It's just past my three-month mark at university, and honestly, I’m surprised my freshmen class is still alive. It has become very apparent that students are embarrassingly underprepared for their college experience, and frankly, I don’t even know who to blame.
I knew that “leaving the nest” would be a shock -- but there’s a difference between “fake it till you make it” and actually fearing for your own safety. Prior to entering college, I was under the impression that I was prepared.
Boy, I was wrong. I guess that’s a shoutout to my stepfather, who warned me to be prepared to be underprepared.
Like all kids, I was (and still am) a stubborn brat who vehemently denied this fact. Fast forward a couple months, and I can admit I deserve an “I told you so.” Luckily for me, my shortcomings haven’t endangered me. They mostly involve a general lack of knowledge for situations I knew I was going to encounter, yet I still find myself unprepared.
Take my first frat party. Barely an hour in, I was helping carry an overly intoxicated girl back to the dorm. I was terrified. The moment I volunteered to help get her back, part of me decided I was responsible for this girl's health and well being.
Yet I had no idea what to do. “Drink water,” they said. Well, how do you get a drunk girl to drink water when she doesn’t want to? “Lay them on their side so they don't choke on their puke,” they said. What about when they aren't sleeping? Like any Generation Z kid, I turned to the internet. Unsurprisingly, it was no help and only increased my anxiety.
Apparently, I also had to worry about her falling asleep and never waking up. Great! After that, I frantically started texting my 25-year-old brother -- he had been through college, is a “real” adult, and should know how to help. Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t much help either -- “relax” was probably the best advice he gave me. Long story short, we all made it through the night -- the only casualty being my shoes that got thrown up on a few too many times.
Besides being traumatized probably for life, that experience showed me just how ready I wasn’t. My immediate reaction, like most students, is to check the Internet, and if that doesn’t give you the answer you want, you call home. Yet the internet is an unreliable mountain of knowledge, and you can only use your “lifeline” call home so many times before your parents become anxious wrecks too.
We were told to be independent, like the generations before us, yet weren’t given the tools to do so. I can live with the fact that my boyfriend didn’t know how to do laundry, or that my roommate didn’t have her own bank account yet. But what about when my car battery died late at night in the reception-less parking garage, and Ms. Independent had no idea what to do? Even that was a relatively easy fix.
In my opinion, the big issue is regarding health. Kids have no idea how to take care of their bodies. Viral meningitis is running rampant on the sixth floor of my building at the moment. I live on the fifth floor. “It's the viral kind, so it won’t kill you,” is what I’ve been told.
I’ve encountered multiple girls with UTIs, who didn’t know what it was until it was too late and gets infected. My boyfriend went to a Catholic high school and consequently didn’t get sex ed. I was taught by a Mormon football coach, so my information isn’t much better than his. I watched a movie to learn about important topics like bulimia and rape, yet received full lectures on abstinence. It's not surprising to me that one in four college students have at least one STD (Health Central).
I was raised in part by my aunt, who is a nurse, and with that upbringing came a general knowledge about health. Yet the information I took for granted growing up never reached my peers. It might be a minuscule issue in the grand scheme of things, but the fact that none of my friends know about the BRAT “diet” was truly shocking.
For readers who don’t know, the Banana, Rice, Applesauce, Toast “diet” is the basis of what you should eat when you have an upset stomach. I was appalled when the stomach flu went around and everyone was eating Chipotle like it didn’t make a difference.
Yet even more alarming was how many people don’t know about advice nurses. Most health plans offer the advice nurse service, which provides a number to call to receive advice regarding medical non-emergencies, like whether or not you should be concerned about that lump on your chest, or whether or not you are having a minor heart attack or just anxiety.
For people with plans without this service, you can still call the doctor’s office to receive the same advice. For my socially anxious friends, Kaiser provides a “Check Your Symptoms” feature. For those without health insurance, campus health services are available at little to no charge.
Once upon a time, students took consumer science or home economics and were taught actual life skills, like how to balance a bank account, and about personal hygiene and health. Nowadays, we have classes on how to pass classes. Somewhere along the way, the focus was shifted to grades and academics to combat the growing competitive market.
What we have left is a generation that can solve a logarithm in their sleep, yet don’t know that drinking on an empty stomach is a bad idea.