I’ve been sitting at my computer for well over an hour thinking of what to write for this column, and my mind is going blank. A few TV shows and computer games later, I am reminding myself of a fact I’ve known this whole year: I have major senioritis.

You know, that thing some seniors get before graduation where they have no motivation to do anything?

Senioritis has plagued me more and more throughout this year. I am about to graduate in May, and I find doing even the shortest homework assignment to be a drag. I spend more time applying for jobs, and even more time doing nothing, than I do studying.

Okay, maybe I do not have severe senioritis since I am on top of finding a job, but mine is at least moderate.

I’m going to ask how many fellow seniors also have senioritis, and I can picture in my head hundreds of people shaking their heads yes. It’s nice to have company. During midterms week did you think, “Screw this! All I want to do is graduate!”

Are you hoping to have the best bar crawl ever the weekend before finals? If so, you are with me even more.

But I am afraid to say that only we can prevent our senioritis from getting worse. Until graduation day, we need to keep reminding ourselves we are almost done. We just need to think of this period like we are 30-plus years in the future preparing to retire.

Let’s imagine graduation is our retirement, and we will get fired if we stop working.

Nothing we do is going to stop the work from coming. No matter how many times we tell our professors we have senioritis or we beg for extensions, they are still going to give us papers and exams.

When we get into the workforce, nothing will ever stop the assignments from coming. And nothing will stop our bosses from despising us if we do not complete them.

Face it, seniors, not doing our work will get us nowhere but in the gutter. If we do not complete our assignments or study for exams, do we really want to barely get by our final semester of college? Do we really want habits like this to carry into our professional experience?

If we do not do our work there, our punishment will be getting fired. No, we will not just get a zero, or fail a test or do poorly in a class. We will get fired, lose our pay and be unable to care for our families.

When my senioritis is at its worst I tell myself and others, “I don’t feel like doing homework because all I want to do is graduate.” I’ve heard some other students make similar remarks.

As I sit here dissecting such statements in my head for the initial time, it sounds as if we think not doing our work will magically make graduation day appear faster.

We have to remember that doing nothing will not make graduation day come any faster, in fact too much of being lazy could postpone some students’ graduation.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I want to have money to support myself and my family. To anyone else who agrees, we have to get over this senioritis thing before our habits linger into our post-graduation lives.

I know that is going to be hard, but hopefully at least some of us can overcome it. Hopefully from now on when we plan out what we want to get done the next day, we’ll actually do it.

In the wake of my Las Vegas spring break, I’ve slept in an extra two or three hours every day this week, thus messing up my schedule. That is not going to cut it if I want to get good grades and find a job. Never mind the fact that such behaviors will not cut it in the professional world.

So to my fellow seniors suffering from this disease, just keep pushing yourselves until graduation. It is really not that far away, and before we know it we will not have any more papers to put off writing, or exams to put off studying for.

We’ll just have tasks at our job, and putting those off will cause much more trouble than senioritis does.