Maybe Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense for presidents George W. Bush and Gerald Ford, said it best at a 2002 press briefing: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

It’s certainly a mouthful, and – to some extent – the quote doesn’t even make sense. But I’ve been thinking about it this past semester, when we keep finding out things that change what we thought about the past. Last month, my advisor told me I’d be graduating this year, making what I thought was my middler year my junior year, and what I thought was my junior year my senior year.

At first, I lamented that I didn’t have a junior year. I went straight from middler to senior, and when I told that to friends and family at Thanksgiving, people just got confused. So I revised my own personal history and decided that everything that happened from September 2007 through August 2008 was part of my junior year.

Alan Schroeder’s Journalism 3 class? Junior year. My co-op at the Boston Globe? Junior year. Going on a family ski vacation but having rain and warm weather melt away the snow? Junior year.

And just think of all the time I wasted. Almost every time I talked to someone without a Northeastern connection, I had to explain myself.

“Well, it’s my third year at school, but since I’ll be there for five years, I’m technically a middler. What’s a middler, you say? Well it is a combination of ‘middle year.’ At least, I think it is. I don’t know if anyone has ever really told me.”

I probably gave that rambling speech a few times each month. Think of all the extra time I would have had if instead I could have just said, “I’m a junior.”

Times are tough these days, and I’ve got bigger problems than lamenting the difficulty of explaining Northeastern terminology to outsiders. Like, oh, maybe getting a job after graduation. Finding a job that gives me health insurance. Not having to live in a tiny apartment, sharing cat food with Mr. Freckles, the cat my future self probably shouldn’t have spent his money on.

At first I wasn’t too concerned. Politicians and TV newscasters spent most of this year telling us “we aren’t in a recession.” But, oh wait, we totally have been, since December 2007, according to an announcement from the National Bureau of Economic Research last week

So not only was I actually a junior during what I thought was my middler year. But for most of that time, we were actually in a recession.

Again, I don’t know if that changes anything. If we had known we were in a recession, would we be any better off? Would companies – like the ones that make cars and the ones that do crazy things on the stock market, which, no matter how hard I try, I do not understand – have made better choices? Would taxpayers have needed to pay billions to bail these companies out?

(Which brings me to a quick sidebar: Why is it called socialism when we want government to ensure people have food on their plates and access to affordable healthcare, but not when Congress and the Treasury are giving companies billions of dollars?)

Now I’m closer to graduation than I thought I’d be, and there’s a good chance this year is among the worst times to graduate in decades. And it doesn’t help that the business I want to go into – newspapers – was largely in poor financial shape before the recession. Maybe I should have heeded the advice of someone who commented on the message board for a story I wrote about last year’s Husky Hunt and reconsidered my career. Of course, I don’t really know what careers I should be going into, so I’ll just stick with what I’ve got.

I don’t know what “unknown unknown” I’ll discover next. Maybe I’ll discoverer I was adopted, and my rich birth parents left me an extraordinary fortune.

But with my luck, probably not.

– Matt Collette can be reached at [email protected]