College, and what i've learned centers around....naps.
1. Naps are not just for babies and old people.
There's no way I would have made it through the school year without a quick snooze session at least three times a week. After much trial and error, I have found that 45 minutes is the perfect amount of time to nap. Waking up from a 45 minute nap leaves me feeling refreshed and recharged without a trace of grogginess. After taking a good nap, I feel like I can do the impossible (which is basically what my calculus III professor assigns for homework).
2. Procrastination is a disease.
3. Mincing garlic with a butter knife is hard, but not impossible.
The dining hall sucks. Sometimes you want something better than pink chicken breast with fake grill lines or hopelessly flavorless pizza with crust that is always either undercooked or burnt to a crisp (no in between). So, you have to take matters into your own hands and try to create a "home-cooked" meal in your small dorm room without a stove or real cutlery. It's tricky, but it can be done. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
4. Yolo.
You may roll your eyes every time you see or hear this overused acronym, but there’s a simple elegance to the truth behind this totally last year statement. You only live once. Sometimes, it’s OK to stay out a little later than you should, or put off that homework until the morning before it’s due. There’s so much to be learned from college outside of the classroom and the study room on your floor. Besides, in the sage words of Frankie Ballard, "How am I ever gonna get to be old and wise / If I ain't ever young and crazy."
5. Common sense isn’t always as common as you’d think.
You can not put metal - yes, that includes aluminum foil - in the microwave. Leaving food out containing milk products, or any food for that matter, for multiple days is a bad idea. If you go out and party almost every night the week you have an exam in your hardest class, you will probably fail. Just because you think Chick-fil-A is “healthier” than most fast-food places still does not mean that you should eat it literally every day of the week, and sometimes multiple times in a single day.
6. Putting a new roll of toilet paper on the holder requires a Ph.D in engineering and an IQ above 200.
Can someone please explain to me why this is such a seemingly impossible task?
7. Questioning your faith is OK.
During my two years at TCU, I’ve met a lot of incredible people from many different walks of life. Some of them had a similar upbringing in a Christian home like I did, but quite a few did not. I have grown to love discussing and learning more about religions and beliefs different from my own. As is natural when learning about anything new, I began to have questions. How do I know that what I believe is right? Who is to say that one faith or belief system about God, or whatever supernatural power created this incredible universe, is more correct than another? Maybe the truth lies not in a single religion, but in bits and pieces from hundreds of different religions.
At first, I was afraid of asking these questions, fearing that doing so would cause me to steer away from faith all together in search of something with more concrete answers. However, I’ve discovered that asking questions about your faith is actually a good thing. Asking questions allowed me to take a deeper look at my religion and to learn more about it, ultimately making my faith stronger than it was before. “Religious belief, like history itself, is a story that is always unfolding, always subject to inquiry and ripe to questioning. For without doubt there is no faith” - Jon Meacham
8. Netflix is the greatest and worst thing to ever have been created.
I have a love-hate relationship with Netflix. I love it because sometimes you just need a break from school work, and what better way to do that than to curl up with some popcorn and soft blanket and watch Olivia Pope be one of the fiercest women Washington D.C has ever seen. However, sometimes taking a “short Netflix sanity break” turns into binge watching five 45 minute episodes in a row and getting absolutely nothing accomplished in the way of school work.
9. Triple integrals aren't actually as bad as they sound.
Thanks to my dynamics and calculus III professors, I feel pretty confident in my ability to properly evaluate a triple integral in polar, cylindrical and spherical coordinates. I’m also pretty sure that being able to derive the moment of inertia of a sphere will forever be ingrained in my brain. See mom, I actually did learn something academic related.
10. The struggle will always be real.
I naively thought that after I graduated from high school, my days of riding the struggle bus were over. False. Adulting isn’t always all that it’s cracked up to be, and whoever said that you don’t have any homework in college either didn’t actually go - or is a big fat liar. While college is undoubtedly 100 percent better than high school, I have come to accept that the struggles will forever be present.
