Of Second-years, seconds, summer, and the next sentence
It is June and we’re approaching the end of the year rapidly.
My first year at RBC has gone by unbelievably quickly: I remember clearly stepping out of the train at Freiburg Hauptbahnhof in August 2025 with the heaviest suitcase I had ever carried and a nervous buzz in every step. Now, the Second Years have left, campus has settled into a peaceful stillness, and all of a sudden, it feels like somebody has handed me time. Especially the last few weeks when graduation was approaching, time felt anything but tangible. “We have 40 days left, guys!” turned into “We’re graduating on Friday!” turned into tearful goodbyes. I wondered:if this is how it goes, leaving RBC at such a speed, then how could I ever be ready for it? I felt bad for the Second Years. Wasn’t it unfair that they had to depart? How could they be satisfied with their time at RBC coming to an end after it had been so horribly short and fleeting?
But with campus half empty, I begin to understand. Time has landed in the palm of my hand now, and I stretch it and mould it as I savor the last days in Freiburg before the holidays. I realize: Time can behave strangely when one lives in a place like RBC.
At RBC, time is measured in weeks, as I immediately learned when I first arrived. Living in a place full of exciting events and opportunities makes living day by day nearly impossible. You have to look weeks ahead to make a plan with friends, because there is no such thing as an overlapping free schedule. One weekend, there is an academic deadline coming up, the next, you are camping somewhere in the wilderness, then, you are stranded in France waiting for a Flixbus on your way back from project week, and then, when the planned movie night finally happens, you realize that it is June, and your year is basically over. Yes, that is speaking from experience.
It does scare me that it is June, and we are about to leave what has become home to us in the past ten months. Are we even ready to return to the other home that might not feel all that familiar anymore? This time, we will carry not just heavy suitcases, but the knowledge that we will be back on campus in ten weeks and our graduation countdown will officially have started.
Ironically, that scary aspect makes living here for only two years so valuable. We are forced to pack as much of our energy, our bucket list items and our heart into the limited time we have. It comes at the cost of (occasionally) sleepless nights, blissfully ignoring deadlines, and sometimes the dull feeling of guilt when there is “nothing to do”. But as we navigate this contortion of time, RBC once again proves to be a microcosm. Because outside of this bubble, our present is constantly accelerating, and nothing could prepare us for it better.
We do live in an ever-changing, ever-stimulating world, where a single second isn’t valued. Big chunks of time are easier to handle. But my first year at RBC has taught me that I want to appreciate the seconds. The minutes. The singular moments. In accelerating times, I want my life not to be measured in years. In hindsight, sure, in a CV, it might be just that: a timeline answering, “What did you do in 2026?”. But right now, as I am writing this? I do not think of next year or next week. I think of the next sentence. And only after that comes summer break.
Photo by Björn Hänssler
