My senior year has barely started and I’m already being inundated with everyone’s thoughts on what next year will bring for me.

This fall isn’t about simply enjoying football games, coatless weather or freshmen-watching (one of my favorite pastimes). No, it’s about job applications, resumes and a lot of business casual attire. Well, forget that.

I think it’d be safe to say that if Northwestern burned down sometime in the near future, I wouldn’t mind too much. This is not an I-hate-NU rant — I’ve merely decided that finishing the year and the attainment of that supposedly glorious beige piece of parchment isn’t necessary for my pursuit of having an “accomplished” life. If Bill Gates can become the richest man in the world, Steven Spielberg can become one of time’s most storied directors and William Safire can become a New York Times op-ed columnist — all without finishing college — I’m sure I can, at the very least, make something of my life, whatever that might be, without doing so either.

That being said, there’s about a 95.874 percent chance I’ll be walking into Ryan Field in June with the rest of the class of 2005, donning a crisp cap and gown. I have no intention of completely abandoning something I’ve already contributed to so much; I just don’t want it to define what I do in life.

I don’t want to have done well in high school, therefore gone to a good college, where I built my resume, therefore got the job, therefore got the salary, et cetera, to have only done what was expected of me simply because I didn’t know for myself what I really wanted out of life. I want my reason for going to class to be because I find the material fascinating, not for a salary I hope to earn someday.

We have an odd fixation with quantitative evaluations. “Northwestern degree” almost is completely synonymous with “$160,000 investment.” So often, we rely on the only concrete variables we know, numbers, for evaluating anything, too timid to actually assert anything based on (gasp) our own thoughts, values and opinions. Consequently, we frequently end up evaluating our fellow peers’ accomplishments in light of such hard figures as their starting salary, the grant they received and the U.S. News and World Report rank of their graduate school.

This is not to say that anyone who gets the job with JP Morgan, gets the Fulbright or gets into Yale Law School is undeserving of recognition — they are certainly considerable achievements. If that’s the type of thing that floats your boat, then by all means strive for them. And if someone else should decide they want to go live in a bungalow on the beach and run a bicycle shop