If you’re a senior-or a super-senior like I am-there has been one constant, one rule to it all: graduate at all cost. That has meant four or more years of sleepless and drunken nights; the whole feverish whirling-dervish dance of collegiate life encapsulating four (or five!) years of isolation from “Real Life.”

For most, it’s been a fantasyland of lazy mornings and electric nights, of brain-popping, soul-expanding ideas and the deluge of drama following it all. A trip none of us could forget, even if we wanted to (assume you haven’t already).

But what next?

Where do we as a generation fit in, amidst this crumbling economy and the broken dotcom dreams of the Silicon Valley generation; how can we, as a class and as a generation, be the change we wish to see in the world we soon will join?

Cooperation. Simple as that.

Every day brings more bad news, like some masochistic postman, and every day hundreds lose their jobs as markets dry up. Jobs we (and the rest of post-grad America) are already overqualified for are almost impossible to find, let alone secure.

And all of this is already old news to us. So let’s face it, we’re not graduating to a world ready to hand us the silver platter.

Guilford is a school of misfits, a place where the alternative is the normative, and each of us has a unique set of skills and talents that can be utilized, but only if we each recognize that the fate of the whole is solely dependent on our own integration into it.

To put it simply, we’re screwed if we try and go it alone, because no one is ever truly an island, and because we’re going to have to work together whether we like it or not.

Let’s face the fact that this recession is heading inexorably towards a general depression, and here we stand, toes to the threshold holding our breath.

Personally, I will be homeless when my lease runs out in July unless I can secure enough income to pay rent before then, and like many of my fellow graduates, options are scarce. What can be done to save ourselves and save this situation we are diving headfirst into?

We came through our childhood, watching with adoration as our older siblings and the other graduates of the early nineties materialized boatloads of wealth, out of thin air and barely a day’s worth of hard labor. The boom of Silicon Valley sent dreams of millions of dollars just waiting for our diploma-clutching hands to pluck from the wondrous Internet through a whole generation.

Our parents kept trying to tell us the world would not just hand you a million dollars, but the talking heads on TV just kept doing the impossible, and we ate it all up. Now we’ve got to reconcile these dreams of get-rich-quick schemes and quick profits, against the rapidly depressing economy and a world full of utter uncertainty.

But, for those of us lucky enough to have come to this school, we have been shown a better way.

You might not have picked up on it in your classes, scribbling away about the amazing things those before us have done, but your teachers have been illuminating the way, so to speak. All that talk of integration, cross-class dialog, interdisciplinary studies, of finding the alternative through cooperation, it all is what we desperately need in tomorrow’s society.

We have, in this small bubble of Guilford College, some of the most talented writers, artists, and theorists of our generation, and we are all in the same boat together. Whether we realize it in our social circles and at our parties or not, we might as well try to go forward as one, instead of vainly seeking our own excellence.

Thanks to the modern age of Facebook and Twitter, we as a generation also have very powerful organizational tools at our disposal, along with a highly developed sense of how to utilize them. Not all those party invites and Facebook groups created in vain have gone to waste; Facebook has trained us well, and soon we will have a network of thousands to tap into for connections and help.

Yet, we must learn from the mistakes of our forebears, who relied on technology to create abstract wealth. Technology drove the entire economy forward on imaginary transactions involving monetary assumptions of the value of risk, and that is something we’re all still trying to figure out. Let’s not get so wrapped up in technology we forget why we started using it in the first place, when we become slaves to eliminating inconvenience we enslave ourselves to technology.

As we walk tall and proud, beautiful in the May sunlight, let us look toward a future where we seek out our peers as alumni, where we stick together amidst the storm, where we are the change we all wish to see in the world.