The month is June and you high school seniors are quickly moving in on the great march that is growing up. In a few weeks or days you graduate. Whether you care to admit it or not, you are intimidated by the fact that the mortifying specter of college is staring at you from the other side of summer break.To ease your apprehensive shuttering and cold sweat-covered nightmares, I have a few pieces of advice for you that I really wish someone had told me before I shipped off to school.
1. The Student-Teacher dynamic is totally different.
Professors at good universities earn about twice as much as the average high school teacher, yet couldn’t be paid to care.
Granted, there are many exceptions—your faculty advisor is quite literally paid to care. Even besides them, there are many sympathetic educators. But you will be shocked at how many of them see students as a filled spot on their roster, especially in general education classes with 200 students. Your college professors are far less likely to reteach you a lesson in homeroom or answer your emails with all deliberate speed. It’s not hard to build relationships with teachers, but when finals week comes around and your grade is teetering on the edge, it is significantly harder to convince a college professor to give you the good look.
And speaking of finals week…
2. Nothing in your entire life has prepared you for taking finals in college.
Finals week is truly unlike anything you have ever had to experience before college. There are no classes on Finals Week; you simply have a series of exams and papers, after which the last is done, you are free to pack up your bags and go home. You have all the free time in the world and no way to use it other than study. You will spend your entire week huddled into a crowded corner of your school library with a stack of notebooks and any digestible substance that contains more than a few milligrams of caffeine. Any facet of your life unrelated to school gets put on the backburner: your diet, your workout regiment, your standards of personal hygiene, and especially your sleep schedule. Every ounce of your effort goes towards studying for exams. The best piece of advice I can give you is to try not to get distracted too easily, and prioritize classes in your major ahead of all else.
But speaking of your major…
3. You will look back at the goals you had freshman year and laugh.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 80 percent of college students change their major at least once. You will not graduate with the same goals that you came to college with. Take me for example. In one night early second semester, my projected career path went from writing for the Columbus Dispatch to selling custom suits or medical supplies thanks to a switch in major and acceptance into a prestigious sales program.
This is not a bad thing. It may seem like you are giving up on your childhood dreams, but you can’t look at it that way. The truth is, you are going to base your switch on careful consideration of where your real talents lie, where your heart is, and what will be a more profitable career choice. I will be able to raise a family incredibly more comfortably by selling high-end clothing to rich executives than I would have writing for a newspaper. This kind of change is a good thing, but the fact that you will likely cave in on your current dream job is an (understandably) uncomfortable truth for many people.
There are a lot of uncomfortable truths in college that you have to get used to, like the fact that…
4. Freshmen are a pariah, but only if they have a Y chromosome.
There is nothing wrong with being a freshman. It’s a necessary first step in the educational process. Despite that no-brainer, freshmen as a whole are looked down upon for some reason. My brother has a theory on this. It is easy to meet people if you already know a lot of people. This is because humans in a social sphere tend to gravitate towards others whom they feel can introduce them to even more people, expanding their network. When one comes to said sphere and knows absolutely no one (through no fault of their own), they offer no perceived value to those around them. This, however, is only an apparent issue for freshman males.
When women arrive fresh out of the minivan to a new school, they have the distinct advantages of being pretty, smelling nice, and not yet being physically affected by the hyper-availability of pizza in college. In this vein, I offer the following advice to incoming freshman men to not come across as too freshman-y:
- Traveling in packs of more than three is a dead give-away.
-Wearing your room key and student ID on the general-issue lanyard and sporting it around your neck or dangling out of your pocket is also a dead give-away.
-Cargo Shorts.
- Please, for the love of God, Allah, Vishnu, or whatever it is you pray to before you tuck yourself in at night, leave the Letterman jacket at home.
-Walking around with Apple Maps pulled up on your phone, or even more blatant, a map of campus is the equivalent to tattooing “I’m new in town” across your collarbones and wearing a beater. I was once told that it is better to walk into an unfamiliar building looking for your class and hope you guess right than to wander around a facility looking in vain for the nameplate.
But there is an incredibly easy way to make friends regardless of age…
5. Join an organization.
Anything. Sign up for anything. Become a part of a group that shares similar interests with you. That is far and away the best way to make lasting friendships in college. Play a club sport. Join a club related to your major. Support a cause that you care about. Sign up for the skiing crew. Rush a fraternity or sorority (#GoGreek). Write for the school paper. Broadcast on the school TV station. There are so few more important actions you can take in college than being active in the community. Nothing will help you make connections and network, all while building your skill set and resume, like being a part of clubs and organizations. Whether you are signing up to clean up trash at the local park, or signing the initiation book of a fine, upstanding Greek Life organization (but seriously #GoGreek), you are going to carve yourself a nice little niche in your college by being active in the community.
I know I’m making college sound like a lot of stress and work, but I promise you…
6. College is the most fun you will ever have.
Ask just about any of your teachers or parents. College is great. For the first time, many of you get to experience true sovereignty. You finally captain the ship of your life completely. There is no place in this world that offers you the opportunity to try so many new things and meet such a diverse group of people, spanning different beliefs, cultures, and places of birth. Go with an open mind and have the time of your life. The possibilities are endless.
