Your years in college will be some of the best in your life. It’s probably the first time in your life that you are on your own and living away from your parents. It’s the start of many things and you meet some of the greatest people. Every person has a different college experience, but here are some things a lot of college students experience:
1) Sleep... or lack thereof.
Once you arrive at college, any hope to receive a good amount of sleep every night is lost. Whether it is because of homework, studying for exams, hanging out with your friends from your hall or going out, your hours spent getting some shut-eye dwindle. Your late nights and early mornings all hit you at once. You may be completely exhausted, but hey, that’s what coffee is for, right?
Kind of like your sleep schedule, your diet is also sacrificed. I now understand “freshman fifteen.” It’s the truth! The dining halls like to serve two things: pizza and any kind of potato. The food available to us is not always the healthiest. With your schedules, it’s hard to fit in time and effort to eat healthy. Another reason is that meal plan is like fake money and you have a certain amount of it to spend just on food. It’s wonderful and terrible at the same time.
Speaking of meal plan, it’s something we grow to become fond of. Once we realized how much we miss it, it’s too late and you have to fend for yourself. When you live on campus, you can get food whenever and without using physical money. A lot of us hate it after awhile. Of course it’s not your parent’s cooking, and it’s sometimes not the greatest, but once you get off of it, you start to beg your younger friends to swipe you in a dining hall.
4) You never really have money.
All summer long you work long hours to save up money to keep up with your college lifestyle, but then you come to realize all your nights buying drinks for friends and spending money on pizza will come back to bite you. Even working during school doesn’t give you the funds to pay for anything. Rent day is officially the worst day of the month, and noodles and ramen are staples.
5) This:
Enough said.
I don’t think I’ve met someone in college who hasn’t had some sort of crisis about their life. College throws some pretty mean curve balls at you that question your entire existence. We’re basically forced to choose what we want to do at the age of eighteen, it’s pretty normal to freak out about it. Eventually things will fall into place, but until then, try to get by.
7) The library becomes your second home.
If you can’t get homework done any place else, the library quickly becomes a second home. You spend hours there trying to cram for your next exam and do the endless amount of stuff your professors give you to do. They might as well just have cots or something for students to get some sleep in between study sessions.
