It’s senior year. Finally an end to the mindless papers and ridiculous General Education requirements. Finally you get that stupid piece of paper that doesn’t really mean much. You’re off to the real world with responsibilities and college loan debts. However, you’re finally in need of that dirty four-letter phrase — a job.

In the failing economy, this curse word comes few and far between. So, if your grades are good enough to secure an interview and you happen to nail it, there should be nothing in your way, right? Well, there may be a big change in order; this isn’t college life anymore. That occasional drug habit you may have picked up over the last four years of partying has gotten to go.

Maybe you only smoke the occasional doobie at parties. Maybe you dabble in a little nose candy. Either way, if your company requires a drug test, you need to be clean.

According to a 2006 report by the Society for Human Resource Management, 84 percent of employers required new hires to pass a drug test before starting their jobs. So how do you make sure Goldman Sachs doesn’t find some weed in your pee? The only legal, safe and cheap way to do so is detoxing.

Depending on a person’s drug habits and usage, different drugs will stay in your body for different amounts of time.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, cocaine will be able to be detected one to four days after usage. Meth takes one to two days to show up in your system. Marijuana detection depends on your own personal usages and could test positive anywhere from one day to five weeks.

Knowing this, you can stop your drug usage when you know you’ll be going for interviews and possible drug testing.

“I’m not gonna lie,” an anonymous senior finance major said. “I’ve been concerned about the possibility of drug testing. If I failed and my dad found out, he’d kill me!”

The real concern with drug testing and the real world is if you’re able to be healthy and still function at your job.

“What we do here is try to reach students and decide if anything they do today will hurt them in their future career,” Bill McCarthy, associate director of the Career Development Center, said. “What’s really at hand is exceeding the test of life instead of beating this one-time test.”

Honestly, the best way to beat a drug test is to not partake in anything that would result in a positive test.

“I’ve basically given up the drugs I used to use recreationally,” an anonymous senior computer science major said. “I might start them up again once I get a job. But I feel kind of skeevy using them once I graduate.”

If you do, consider the fact that it will be much harder to maintain a drug-influenced lifestyle when you can’t just sleep it off the next day and miss all of your classes. You may also want to be careful of things that can result in a false positive, such as poppy seeds and some over-the-counter drugs.