What I wish I knew before going to College

When I went off to college, I was ready. I was ready to live on my “own”, to manage my time, to go to bed whenever I wanted. I knew how to do my own laundry, (some people don’t, you’d be surprised) and I even had my own medicine drawer with ibuprofen, Benadryl, and the likes. I was 18 and was the only person responsible for me. Like I said, I was ready. But little did I know, I still had a lot to learn, and I’m not talking about APA formatting.

College is what you make it

College lifestyles don’t pick you, you pick the lifestyle. It sounds like common knowledge now, but you’d be surprised to learn that sometimes students never go out and then complain that college is boring. Yeah, college is going to be boring if you hide in your room every day.

But I know, trust me, I know, that it is just so easy to wrap yourself up in a blanket burrito and spend the rest of the day binge-watching your comfort show. This itself isn’t a problem. In fact, I believe that everybody needs to get a couple blanket burrito hours in every week. The problem comes when you do it every day, all day. Like I said, college will be boring if you hide in your room all day, even if you have a roommate.

You need to go out and actually do something. This doesn’t mean to go get wasted at parties every weekend, but go find something to do. This includes going shopping, sightseeing, going to sporting events, and even activities like bowling or rollerskating.

I know what you’re thinking, “Elle, I’m a college student, I’m poor,” but you’re in luck. One of my favorite free things to do is to go to the local library, and, for a couple dollars, used book stores. Library cards do not cost anything, and used books are often quite cheap. A nice walk in the park is also free. You can lay a blanket underneath a tree and just relax. You could read, write, journal, or anything really! Additionally, local stores and roller parks/bowling alleys likely have a student discount.

You could even just hang out with your friends in the lounge or in your dorm room. My point is that you just need to do something.

(Almost) everybody wants to make new friends

Think about it. Everyone else in the orientation room is in more or less of the same situation as you. (Almost) everybody wants to make friends at college, and the most popular way to do this is to befriend others at orientation. It’s easier to make new friends when you’re with people who also want to make new friends.

It’s true that some of them may already know each other, but that doesn’t mean that everybody has a friend, and you’re the odd one out. (Almost) Everybody is nervous. (Almost) Everybody is afraid of having no friends.

I have to include the word “almost” because there’s someone, somewhere that doesn’t want to make friends and isn’t nervous and isn’t scared of having no friends. But I’ve never ever met someone like this, and you probably won’t either.

Professors can be assholes

In high school, I had many amazing teachers. Of course there were a couple that weren’t good at teaching or hated their job. When I went to college I thought that professors could be tough and maybe have a rough exterior, but they care about teaching. That’s how they got so far into their careers, by being good.

Then I had this professor, we’ll call him Jake. Jake thought that he was cool, and that he was young enough to relate to his students. True, he was somewhere between 30 and 50, and he had taught for years before getting a job as a professor, but Jake sucked. And I mean he was awful.

Honestly, I went into the semester with high hopes because he had been described as “fun” and “hip.” He was also the teacher of 4/6 of my classes due to low staffing in my content area. I thought, “grate, I’ll have this amazing professor for these four classes, and I’ll learn a lot and maybe even have some fun too!” Boy was I wrong.

To be fair, he did teach me some very important life lessons, such as how to stand up for authority figures, asshole professors that like to scare you actually exist, hypocrites are a hilarious reflection of irony, and to trust my gut. I don’t have time to get into all of these stories, but he sucked. He thought I was funny to make us sweat about making impossible deadlines, and then to push those deadlines back. He loved to complain about all the grading he had to do for his four classes, but failed to account for how much work the students turned in for those classes, many ungraded by the way. He preached the importance of making your students comfortable, and then he barged into the room yelling. I could go on and on and on. But my point is, unfortunately, professors can be prolific assholes.

Not everyone knows how to communicate

University is full of all kinds of different people. Unfourtunatley, this includes people who never learned how to properly communicate. This includes people who think the “silent treatment” is the best solution to any and every problem as well as people who still start petty drama because they're bored. I thought we left these behaviors in middle school, or even high school for the last couple of stragglers. But no, there are full 18-year-olds that would tell a mutual friend that you don’t like them just so they can sit back and watch the aftermath. There are full 18-year-olds who stop talking to you the second you have any kind of conflict, including if you did better on a test or assignment than they did… after they ask what you got.

College is meant to be a place where you learn A LOT. From the curriculum and your degree to interpersonal relationships and how to take care of yourself, there are many lessons to be learned. After reading this post, I hope you can scratch some of those lessons off your “to learn” list!

Always,

-Elle