Senior Spotlight: Rohan Deshpande

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” ~Winnie the Pooh

This quote is a yearbook staple—it showed up no less than six times in my freshman yearbook, and is so popular that my home school puts a limit on the number of people who can use it. However, before coming to Gatton, I loathed this quote. It always felt so flaky, so vague. It felt like trying to compliment someone, but only being able to throw out generic adjectives that could apply to anyone, like “cool” or “nice”. Maybe I was just an angsty teenager trying to go against the grain of society, but I sincerely thought my alumni who quoted that pudgy, anthropomorphic bear were looking back on their high school experience with rose-colored glasses. Now, with the glow of my own graduation fading away, I can recognize how true my homeboy Pooh’s words are.

If you had to condense this long-winded, sappy story of mine into one sentence, it would be this: my Gatton experience was incredible. The places I went, the people I met and the memories we shared are priceless. On Move-In Day, almost two years ago, I came in afraid. I was scared the college workload would be too much, that “real” college kids would make fun of me, that my peers would have the social skills of an unsalted peanut. Now, these fears seem innocuous. If I could go back in time to give advice to my 16-year-old self that first night, I wouldn’t say a thing. I would just laugh at past-me and leave to have fun with my friends. The joy of Gatton truly was in the journey.

The classes would be tough, but they would be far more interesting than anything I had taken before—they would be on subjects I was actually interested in, and not just something dull to round out the 7^th slot in my schedule and look good on my transcript. I learned that in college, nobody has the time to care about what other people think about themselves. You could walk to Subway wearing pajama pants and Crocs and nobody would bat an eye. If it was finals week, you probably wouldn’t even be the first to do so that day. As for my class, they’re as cool as cucumbers. At the very least, they’re definitely cooler than someone who still uses “cool as cucumbers.”

It’s hard to describe Gatton—it is so much more than a group of smart kids from Kentucky. The stories I have from the past two years would make Beth’s head spin. I could talk about how I almost dropped half of a human brain while handing it off to Jeremiah in our neurobiology class, or how we found an injured, highly venomous yellow-bellied sea snake on the beaches of Costa Rica and our professor picked it up with his bare hands to store it in a water cooler overnight before releasing it. I could spend days reminiscing on my time at Gatton, but my time with those Kentucky goons has come to an end.

It’s hard to think I won’t return to Gatton in the fall, that two years could feel so long yet fly past in the blink of an eye. If someone asked me my future plans, I would tell them I plan on being that annoying guy at work who still brags about his time in high school to anyone who will lend an ear. I didn’t just make friends at Gatton, I made family. I am so happy I had an experience that made saying goodbye so hard.