EVANSTON — As he sat through yet another seemingly endless Essential NU, Jack Preacher made a startling realization, “Shit! School starts in like three days!”

Preacher said he enrolled at Northwestern because of its great Wildcat Welcome program. “Finding my lifelong friends, rocking the beach, seeing A Capella Fest—that’s why I came to Northwestern. I never really thought about what would happen after that.”

He was not the only one who became aware of this dire situation. As Wildcat Welcome Week approached its inevitable conclusion, hundreds of freshmen lamented the fact that they would actually have to start going to classes soon.

“It happened to my friends at other schools much earlier,” said Kyle Freeman, one of many shocked freshmen. “I guess I should have seen this coming, but I just never really thought it’d happen to me.”

Lily Sanders, another bereaved freshman, noted, “I loved making new friends, learning new things, and having fun during Wildcat Welcome. I’ll never be able to do those things again once classes start.”

The feeling of grief is so strong that the Class of 2017 Wildkittens have scheduled a candlelight vigil at Norbucks for the night before their first classes. As Gregory Hansen, the freshman who coordinated the event, described, “We needed a good way to send of the best week of our lives. It only seems fitting we hold this service to cherish our memories of such a wonderful time.”