If you give a college student three hours to study, she will make good use of her time. One hour to get organized, one hour to study the material, and one hour to scroll through her various social media feeds and read articles about self-care and time management.
If you give a college student a latte, she’ll probably transform it into a caffeine addiction.
If you give a college student an advisor, she will end up with five. In different departments. She will bend over backwards to get them on the same page, CC-ing and forwarding with a vengeance, but she will never surmount the age gaps, empathy gaps, and heated dispute between AP and MLA.
If you give a college student a can of soup, a jar of peanut butter, and a box of Annie’s white cheddar shells, she’ll have three meals. Maybe four.
If you give a college student a major, she will turn it into three. One of them never to be completed, due to a couple months puttering around in the art or astronomy department. Maybe she’ll add a minor to make up for it.
If you give a college student an important document, she’ll probably lose it, but she’ll always have her various punchcards on her in hopes of earning that free froyo or bubble tea after ten punches.
If you give a college student a love life, she will make a mess out of things. She will be talking to this one guy, who seems interested when she sees him in person but never replies to her texts, and avoiding this other guy, who asks her to do too many suspiciously one-on-one activities, and also looking at this hipster girl in her lit class who she can’t tell if she wants to date or wants to be.
If you give a college student an aspirin, she’ll probably still have a headache.
If you give a college student nothing, she’ll make something out of it. If you give her some paper clips and bottle caps, she’ll make a mobile, or wind chimes, or jewelry. If you give her a notepad and the midnight oil to burn, she’ll have a polished article with quotes and sources by three or four a.m. She might be hungry, sometimes, because it’s too difficult to make it to the grocery store during her busy weekdays, and she might be sleep-deprived most of the time, and she might be jittery at random times because of her anxiety disorder, but she’s also in love with life. She knows the power of a good cup of coffee or a single night out to cure the blues.
She wants to be a life-long learner, and can’t imagine being anywhere other than in school. She always wants to be a student of something. She’s learned so much just in the past few days, the past few hours. That a panic attack can manifest as staring blankly and silently at an equally blank and silent wall. That exhaustion has its own smell. That there’s a place IRL called Loafer’s Glory and the Spanish word for mushroom is hongo and the Australian quokka is supposedly the happiest animal in the world.
So sometimes things might not get done, but that’s okay. Sometimes she eats a diet that seems completely composed of burritos and tic-tacs. But she also consumes a rich mixture of poems, songs, essays, stories, articles, TV episodes, anecdotes, emoji-laced text messages, social media posts showing friends and loved ones doing well, etc. She has long list of people she has to avoid. But she also has a long list of people she has to collaborate with. She usually has no time to put on her make-up in the morning -- she’s got waking up ten minutes before she has to catch her bus down to an art form. But she’s outgrown the phase in her life when wearing makeup was essential to bolstering her self-esteem.
Her self-esteem is propped up by what she does, not how she looks. It’s propped up by backpacking trips and perfectly executed bong rips with dear friends, by a second language learned and a resume polished. It’s a life of scarcity and riches, nonstop mixed blessings.
And if you give a college student a cookie, she’ll probably eat the whole box.
