In my college experience, I’ve been a Pre-Nursing major, Biology major, English major, Biology again, and finally settling on English (with a focus on writing and editing) once again in November of 2015.
I’ve always been one to learn things the hard way (I blame being a Sagittarius, but I digress), and college has been a prime vessel for my stubborn nature to come out. Even though college has been quite the difficult experience, as it is for most, I have learned a thing or two from my mistakes. Here are seven of the millions of things I’ve learned that I think are the funniest – and most helpful.
1. The jerks you encounter in high school don’t know a damn thing.
I had the luxury of attending a small private school for high school. For those of you who didn’t attend a private high school, the only things that everyone – the students, the teachers, the leaders – cares about are: a) knowing what you want to do for the rest of your life even though you’re a brace-faced, glasses-wearing, stringy-haired, fourteen-year-old who still sleeps with a stuffed animal (me, that was me); b) making sure that you never go to community college – because, according to almost every one of my peers, “community college is where stupid people go,” which is so untrue, it’s laughable. I was scorned by some of my friends for not knowing what I wanted to do with my life when I was sixteen, and was told by them, once I considered English as a degree, that “nobody with an English degree gets a job.” If that doesn’t annihilate your very volatile self-esteem right there, I don’t know what will. But, since I was an innocent and insecure little thing, hearing that destroyed my confidence in my future – for a time, that is. Yet here I am, with an almost completed English degree, a published author and writer for The Odyssey, with various job opportunities for after I graduate. Don’t let anyone steal your fire. If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.
2. Nobody cares what you’re wearing.
Again, this may be influenced from the fact that I had to wear a uniform for all of high school, but during my first few semesters of college, I was obsessed with what I wore (see my article from August 15th for more reasons behind that). Since I had seldom been given an opportunity to express myself in my clothing in high school (occasionally we were awarded with “dress down days”), I was consumed with building my reputation and image with my clothing – for a little while at least. After my junior year or (first) senior year, I realized that not one damn person cares about what you’re wearing or how you look – because, frankly, they don’t care what they look like either. I’d see upperclassmen wearing the same t-shirt for six school days in a row, wearing socks with sandals, or still wearing last night’s makeup with their hair tied up in a bun. It was quite liberating – and now I am one of those upper classmen who hasn’t worn real pants since last month, who usually uses sunglasses as a hair styling tool, and who doesn’t remember what she looked like with makeup on. Everyone’s too consumed with all the homework that they haven’t done yet to worry about how long it’s been since you changed shirts.
3. You get creepily good at removing clothing in public.
Now I don’t mean that I’m stripping down in the library every other weekend, but for bra-wearers like me, you start to just not have time for bras anymore. One day in A&P Lab, my bra was just so uncomfortable (probably because I’d jumped from a B cup to a D in two months – see again previous article) that I slipped the thing off from underneath my hoodie and shoved it in my backpack without one soul noticing. #freethenipple like a champ.
4. No one knows what they’re doing with their lives either.
On those painful first days of class, when the teacher makes the students go around the room and “tell everyone your name and your major,” various answers you hear are either half-coherent or results with a “My name’s Josh and I don't know what I’m doing yet.” Everyone else’s confusion and lack of direction makes yours seem less isolating.
5. Never take 8 a.m. classes.
Do I really need to elaborate on this one? Nothing feels worse than waking up before the sun comes up in February, when the air is so cold that your lungs can’t expand and the wind is so sharp that your eyes feel like they’re going to bleed and your backpack is so heavy that you can feel your spine straining – all to go and be lectured at, half-awake and angry, for an hour and fifteen minutes. No, thank you. Never again.
6. If you think you’re hard enough to drink straight liquor without a chaser, you’re not.
College parties sparked this in me. I still shudder. For some reason, I had this wild notion a couple of years ago and decided that I was going to be a Vodka Chick – a Smirnoff Apple Vodka Chick, to be specific. I would down entire bottles of that Smirnoff garbage just to prove that I could out-drink or keep up with all the people I was with. I have no idea what I was trying to prove, as it just made me look like an alcoholic, but it took far too long for me to wise up. After several instances of drinking too much vodka, puking too much vodka, and subsequently getting alcohol poisoning from said vodka, I decided to call it quits. Just stick to drinking wine at home with your dogs whilst watching "Parks and Rec".
7. Don’t ever try to go to school full time and work full time.
As a sufferer of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), it is painfully difficult for me to finish the simplest tasks without distraction. Add on the stress of working 30-40 hours a week with a full, sometimes overly full, course load, and you can forget getting anything substantial done. I tried to work full time at a Pool and Patio store during the latter half of my freshman year of college and taking 12 credits – at some point, one of those responsibilities are going to suffer; either your work performance will decline or your grades will plummet. There’s no way that you can have a healthy work-life balance when you spread yourself too thin. As everyone has always told me, and as I have come to believe, school comes first. This job you have at Barnes & Noble, or Ulta, or Target can wait – your career matters most. Maybe if you work less, you’ll have to ask your parents or a friend for some extra cash, but that’s an irritating and somewhat embarrassing favor that will benefit you in the end.
8. Although college sucks and feels like it will last forever, you will miss this time.
My fiancé, now 27, has been out of college and in the working world for a while now. Although he knows the woes of college life, he also misses the lack of responsibility of that time. After college and after you move out on your own life is: bills, no summers off, the crippling weight of responsibility, utter exhaustion with no spring or winter breaks, bills, financial pressure, taxes, selling your soul to a job that eats you alive, and also, bills. No, you’re not going to miss the exams, the deadlines, the insensitive teachers, and the moron classmates, but you’ll miss the freedom that comes with a student. As much as college has kicked my ass, I’ll miss it. I guess.
