"How’s college going? You must be loving it!" are often the first remarks made to you if you're in college. You don't think twice about your response, and quickly answer with a positive and reassuring, "Yeah! I love it!" As those positive words slip through your tongue, you're thinking to yourself how much you, in fact, do not love college.
When we start college, we are expected to love it. Before we begin college, we hear stories from those around us about college being the best time of their lives. Everyone tells you to enjoy college because it goes by so fast and we’ll want to go back once its over! We listen to these stories and we believe these stories and we begin to anticipate the day we finally get to experience it for ourselves. Then, in the blink of an eye, we're there. Suddenly, that anticipation of getting to college is gone. We go from class to class and make a few friends along the way. We get through each day smiling, saying hi to familiar faces, but that feeling that everyone talks about so enthusiastically is not there. That smile you give to people is often masking the isolation you are actually feeling.
This is an experience I can very much relate to. As a sophomore in college, I haven't found adjusting to be so simple. For me, it wasn’t about the academics; I could handle the pressure of my classes. However, what I found I could not handle was the adjustment to finding that amazing social experience I had heard about all too often. “There must be something wrong with me,” is something I often find myself thinking. I ask myself why I am not experiencing college the same way everyone else is. In my eyes, I see people loving college, I see that they have found their friends, the ones that will likely “last a lifetime," or so I’ve been told. I see these people really experiencing college as the best time of their lives.
The college experience that I myself have been experiencing is felt by many college students today. However, in today’s day and age, it is so difficult to talk about because we are constantly at competition with one another. No one shares the stories about the difficulty that some of us have adjusting to new social lives in college, but instead we try to impress one another with stories about all the new friends we’ve made and all the likes we’ve gotten on our various social media accounts. We are always trying to one up each another.
It hasn’t been until this semester that I've really voiced what I actually feel about my college experience. I've never talked about it in the past because I was afraid of what people might think. I wanted so badly, like many of us, to impress people with stories about how awesome college is.
What we need to understand is that everyone experiences college differently, and everyone adjusts to college on their own time. I don’t want anyone else to feel what I have felt for almost a year and a half. It’s important to talk about college in the way we actually experience it. I’ve learned that I’m not the only person who feels this way and I won't be the last. If we stop worrying about everyone else’s college experience and really focus on our own, and are honest about it, we’ll come to the realization that many other people can relate to us. Some of us might be loving college and some of us might not be, and that’s okay. Just know that if you're like me and are still learning to enjoy it, you're not the only one and in your own time, you’ll learn to make the best of it.
