In the thick of finals week, my friend and I were lying on the bed, reflecting on our favorite memories from freshman year. Nostalgia ensued as we took turns appreciating specific individuals in our lives who brought us out of our shells, made us feel at home (we both come from out of state, unlike many students at Rice), and have become our closest friends regardless of location.
So I asked him what his favorite memories from sophomore year were; neither of us had really thought about it, and all we could recall immediately were awful memories. After laughing about the previous semester’s disaster of an English class (neither of us finished a single book, please don’t tell the professor), I joked, “We’re just as sh*tty as we were freshman year.”
And then we looked at each other after a beat’s pause, panic evident on our faces as we realized, that might actually be true. We might actually not be any smarter than we were freshman year.
What on earth were we doing? Here we were — he had an exam technically that same day, which he hadn’t even started studying for, and I had a final project that was due over a week ago — and we were being sh*tty potatoes at 2 a.m.
How much had we really learned from freshman year? If we make the same mistakes (back in the day, we’d stay up till 4 a.m. just for fun), does that mean we’re just as bad? Does that make us worse, since we’re acting with previous knowledge in mind?
Maybe we stayed up just as late, not necessarily working the whole time, but with actual tasks to complete. Maybe instead of burning the midnight oil (and beyond) in the floor lobbies with crowds of people not even attempting to pretend to work, we were scattered across campus in various study spaces, accompanied by dwindling groups of people trying to focus on finishing something that was actually due.
Perhaps our recovery time got faster, and we learned to survive averaging four hours of sleep. Or, we burned out, each one of us getting hit by some form or another of an existential crisis. Did we want to go to medical school? Did we want the possibility of grad school? How good are our GPAs, really? What do we want to do with our lives? And what even are we doing in college?!
To be honest, I might say I made more mistakes sophomore year, maybe in different areas, but the mistakes were still there. But I like to think that sophomore year, for many of us, was learning what we’re able to handle, how much we can take before we break. Many of us had hellish years, worse than freshman year in some ways and better in others. We know now who our friends are, who our support systems are, but now more than ever, as we approach junior year (!), we're faced with the very real prospect of what exactly our academic studies, our tuition, are going toward.
Freshman year, we dicked around (for lack of a better term, really) without thinking, taking the consequences without much reflection. We joked that we were awful, and then brushed it off to repeat the same wasted weekend again.
Sophomore year — well, yeah, we were probably just as stupid, but a little more thoughtful. So you win some, you lose some. If we think just enough, we might actually figure our crap out in time to make junior year something we're proud of.
