“So, what are you, a grad student?” a new friend asked me the other day. It was the first week of school, and I must have looked pretty old.

“Oh, well no, I’m a senior,” I replied, adding, with a bit of chagrin. “Actually, a second-year senior.”

“Ah, that’s cool,” said the polite sophomore. “You just looked like you could be in grad school.”

You know who you are. Yes, you. Right there. I know you’re reading this, probably somewhere in the HUB, or perhaps on the bus. You’re a “super-senior,” just like me. In my case, I transferred to the UW as a junior and need a bit more time to finish up, a fairly common predicament.

As it turns out, being a super senior just doesn’t hold the shame it used to. In olden days, before the credit cap and stringent graduation requirements designed to get academic loiterers out of the system, second-year seniors were sometimes mocked and often teased. With the rise of the dreaded cap on the total number of credits a UW student could take, this quasi-outcast feeling became official state policy.

You better have a darn good reason to be sticking around longer than your allotted time. This isn’t private school, we were told. No piddling allowed. Like Jedi Knights hunted down by the nascent Empire under the still-smoking Darth Vader, super-seniors became a rare breed.

But that seems to have changed.

We’re still encouraged — sometimes firmly — to get done and out the door as soon as possible; the “we like you, but you’re time is up” reminders still do come in the mail. But among our peers, second-year-senior status is no longer a scarlet letter to be borne with humiliation and despair.

So much for savoring one’s unique position as the last of his or her academic tribe. I know many more second-year seniors now than I did when I first came to the UW. Perhaps it’s the economic downswing — why hop out of school faster than you need to. Or maybe some people just, and this is shocking, actually enjoy school.

Graduate school is a luxury that not all of us can afford. Most, in fact, will happily finish their education with a bachelor’s degree and head out into the wily world of the workforce more than content. But some of us wouldn’t mind going to graduate school. Internships and part-time jobs have given us an appreciation for education that we might not have had as freshmen.

As it turns out, just being able to learn, even for a season in life, is a luxury. It is a full-time job, and while it’s not for everyone, most people seem to benefit from the opportunity to grow up a little more, learning more about subjects such as physics, history or languages, but also, and more importantly, more about who they are — and, I hope, what they want to do.

So I say it’s OK to be a second-year senior. It’s one more year to finish up an education at a great school in a beautiful place. Indeed, I sometimes wonder why we aren’t all super seniors. Oh, wait ... if that were the case, there’d be no room for the freshmen.

Reach columnist Will Mari at opinon@dailyuw.com.