Walking around the campus in the beauty of the early fall, I'm struck by how close I feel to my parents.

My dad was a Domer and my mom was a Belle. And it seems to me that in the fall, I can almost see them on campus. I can see my dad playing pickup basketball on the Stepan Courts. I can see my mom in The Observer's office, arguing with other editors. I can see them hurrying to class across the quads in the late summer air. If I could just turn quickly enough, I could catch a glimpse of my parents, 28 years younger.

Maybe it's the nostalgia in the air. Notre Dame seethes nostalgia in the fall, with football and alumni and the smell of barbecue and burning leaves.

Maybe it's because I'm a senior, and I'm full of nostalgia as well. Every time I do something, it's the last. It's my last first home football game. My last first Observer issue. My last move-in.

And maybe it's because I'm finally starting to make life decisions like an adult. Until now, it's all been prescribed. I knew I was going to college, I just didn't know where. I knew I was taking classes, I just didn't know which ones.

Now I'm making a completely free decision about what I'm going to be doing. My parents aren't paying, they aren't helping me decide, they aren't telling me what I need to do. As I fill out applications for grad and law school and I take the GREs and LSATs, I do so knowing that it's totally up to me what I do next. Maybe this is what makes me feel so close to my parents.

Once upon a time, my parents were 21-year-old college students. Once upon a time, they were facing the same decisions I am. They were deciding where to go after graduation and what to do next.

This makes me feel a little better about the fact that I don't have a clue where I'll be next year. If my parents survived the transition from college to adulthood, maybe I inherited that gene. Maybe I will eventually figure out what I want to do next. Maybe it'll even be before the deadline for making that decision.

I'm relieved to know that my parents faced the same decision. That as they hurried to class in O'Shaughnessy, they were thinking the same thoughts I'm thinking now. That their heads were full of the same decisions. That my dad would be attempting to do homework and stop midsentence to stare off into space and contemplate the future. That my mom would lie awake at night and try to plan it all out.

A lot of things have changed since 1972, the year my parents graduated. Notre Dame went co-ed the next semester. Buildings have been built, endowments have ballooned, administrations have changed.

But walking along the sun-lit quads, following my parents' footsteps, I know that the feeling of absolute freedom and utter terror I have when thinking about the future is not new. Walking down these same paths, my parents felt the same way.

And that is profoundly comforting.

• Walking in their footsteps