There were columns I didn’t write this year, carpings about politics and celebrity endorsement, treatises on the state of the American student, Lindsay Lohan, boat shoes, and breakfast cereal, and experimental writings on the simultaneous, if not perceived, ease and supreme difficulty of women.

Some of these were actually written, scrawled on legal pads and gone unpublished, currently living out as lining in a drawer or a bookmark in a magazine. Others were never articulated, left to languish in the corners of the mind, next to staler memories and an essay on Moby Dick. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

For as much as I tried to offer an honest cross section of the hearts and minds of this student population, as much as I tried to lay bare my own emotional wrestling, what I had to say is only as relevant as the truth you were able to extract from it. Whether anything I or anyone else who appeared revolvingly in these pages had to say resonated within you, I probably won’t know. I can hope. I can bribe. But in the end it also doesn’t matter. My time isn’t nigh, it’s up. A lot of you, I’m sure, have checked out long ago.

Hereto within this very office, the graduating have been ushered out slowly, some more gracefully than others. And that’s how it should be.

I’ve put off writing this column for awhile, but the truth is I’ve been writing it for years. It represents, not much unlike the last paper you might have turned in on Friday, or the take-home final lingering on your desk, the only thing standing between me and exile — the last crusade. Your last rites.

I’m not nearly about to verge into the soupy sentimentality that has characterized writings of this capacity before. This isn’t a memory quilt or an autograph book where I’ll ask for your e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers. I’ve been around long enough to suffer through my share of mawkish goodbyes. They’re a lot worse in print.

There are certain points within this experience that changes who you are. This isn’t like T.V., and it usually isn’t overt. But after awhile, who you see in the mirror is different. It’s a good feeling, that the world trusts you enough to set you loose, whether or not you want it to.

In the end, truth is found in reflection. It can’t be taught, and I don’t think anyone tries to anymore — at least not anyone worth their tenure. What I’ve found for myself, through two coasts, a few months on the other side of the world and enough caffeine to fuel a Soviet satellite, is that the outside is not your grandma’s condo in Fort Lauderdale, and it is left to no one but yourself to figure out how to navigate a reality that is shrinking as much as it’s expanding.

Higher education isn’t cheap anymore. And there is no shortage of critics who will tell you college isn’t what it used to be. They’re right. In rosier times, you walked hallowed halls and spilled rote lines of long-dead proverbs, and professors were as lauded as the epic poetry they imbued in their every word. And then you left.

Now you pay for the Blue Books in which you scrawl commentary memorized off the internet, fully stripped of any emotional investment. The halls are less hallowed than they are marked by dropped expectations. And college is better for it. Now, it’s worth something. Don’t spend it all in one place.