Before you get to college, there are three different types of fears:
- Will I make any friends?
- Will my classes be too tough?
- What if I hate living in a dorm?
The first two worries are completely rational. You want to make as many friends as you possibly can, because we are all humans and nobody wants to feel lonely and not have anybody to hangout with.
Furthermore, if you’re a freshman in college, you are technically still in the high school mindset. You have just gotten out of a very structured educational system where doing work is not too hard to get done because you have teachers breathing down your neck to make sure you get started on things.
In college not only do you lack supervision, but the academic and intellectual load is unbearable compared to those two-page essays we all complained about by senior year, so it’s understandable to be worried about your academic performance in college.
The most prevalent of these worries, though, will forever be the universal thought that life in a college dorm might very well suck and make the next four years of your life miserable.
We all worry about the people we will have to deal with in our floor, as well as how we are going to get along with our roommate. This is probably the biggest worry to every freshman. Your floor might be filled with the biggest douchebags in the world, or the most amazing people you’ll ever encounter, but your roommate is the one person you will actually have to put up with.
So several people look forward to the day that they will no longer have to live in a college dorm and move into their own apartment with their closest friends, where they can cook their own food and not have to deal with the campus’s crappy cafeteria food.
I can’t speak for other college students, but I definitely do not regret living in my college dorm.
Sure, I might not hang out with the people from my floor or my roommate all the time, but hey, that’s what other floors are for. And if you are confident enough to step out of the shell of your room and move around the building, you will most probably meet some pretty amazing people. I have personally met some great friends by doing this.
I sometimes wish I could live off-campus, because walking across the dirty floor, barefoot, and only covered in a towel to take a shower is a pretty uncomfortable situation to put yourself in, especially when there are prospective students touring the dorms.
But nothing will ever compare to the amazing dorm parties that you could even get to plan. And if you are lucky enough, you might get to know some social butterfly that will invite you to parties in other dorms.
If I lived off campus, I know that I would go straight home right after class and I wouldn’t even get the chance to meet enough people to socialize and find out about these events.
This would then make me lose part of the whole college experience, which is not only getting an education, but living and interacting with all kinds of people and learning how to deal with others on a daily basis, not just in the classroom.
And let’s be honest: we all still have that high school dream of trashing our floor on a Friday night, just like in the movies.
