Dear Pessimistic College Student,
You were a high school senior. You visited tons of colleges and universities. You filled out all of your college applications and received a bunch of acceptance letters. You compared all of the acceptance letters and the pricings of each school. You took into account each school's size, campus, atmosphere and offerings. You then realized that you have the whole world ahead of you and you chose one. You finally chose a college or university you see yourself going to. You thought you made the perfect choice.
You’re finally a college freshman and something isn’t agreeing with you. This given college just isn’t clicking with you.
Maybe you didn’t make friends. Maybe you did, but maybe they turned against you or maybe you just simply didn’t feel like going out with your new roommates. You then began to make up excuses such as your stomachs not agreeing with the campuses food or that you need air conditioning in your dorm room simply to make yourself believe you really aren’t happy.
Your mind started to go straight from positive to negative; everything was an annoyance instead of joy. You began to lock yourself out (if you haven’t been doing so already) and began to keep to yourself.
The one thing you couldn’t keep to yourself was your opinion because at this point your only thoughts were transferring and this is where the problem stirs.
At this point, you’ve created a border between your genuine mind and the people who you could actually get along with because of your negativity towards your given college.
Your first topic of conversation always happened to be about the college. The second you began a conversation with someone, the first thing that came out of your mouth happened to be something along the lines of ‘ugh I hate how (insert college here)…’
This attitude does either of two things. It either repels people from wanting to become your friend, or it manipulates schoolmate’s thoughts on the same college. Maybe the schoolmate you’re complaining to is completely happy with everything the school has to offer, but your opinions make their way into the mind of this innocent student and maybe, because of you, they’re beginning to overthink their opinions as well. You began to make people feel bad about their choice to go to a school that they love.
Well here’s some advice for you: college is what you make out of it.
If people come to you asking you if you want to go to the movies with a group of people, or out on the town for a night out, get yourself out of bed and realize that Netflix will be there for you when you get out. You should have taken advantage of the social life. If someone ever made you feel like crap, realize that this isn’t high school anymore; you are in charge of who you surround yourself with so join clubs and organizations to meet people who are similar to you. You should have taken advantage of all the offerings your school has because they’re not just there to look pretty.
If at this point you are still unhappy with your college experience then maybe your next best option really is to transfer, but the last thing you should be doing is being a pessimist and putting your negative opinions out there for innocent happy students to hear.
But if you weren’t taking advantage of what your college has to offer, if you weren’t making the most out of your college experience then maybe you’re just lazy.
Maybe you just didn’t know how to “do” college.
