Hey! We’re no longer freshman! This is more exciting than it really should be for us. Now we get to complain about how incompetent and annoying the freshmen are all the time. How they get lost and don’t know how to study, even though we were them just a few, short months ago. But that’s beside the point. Now that we’re no longer freshmen, we can really get into our major-related classes (yay!). We can hold our heads high on campus and act like the sophisticated sophomores we are, right? We’ve moved up in the world as we start internships, resume building and going grocery shopping. We are no longer the wide-eyed freshman we were once were; that was a million years ago. We’re working our way up to being adults now.
The grass is always greener on the other side though. Now that we’re sophomores, we envy the upperclassmen. They live off campus in cute little houses and apartments, furnished with do-it-yourself projects and tapestries. They drive cars, drink wine and do real adult things. The end of school is in site for them, too, since juniors are looking forward to one last, amazing year as seniors and seniors are counting down the weeks until graduation before going off to the real world. But for us, there is still a long way to go. We have over two full years left of school and many of us still live on campus in shoebox size dorms. So even though it’s great that we’re no longer freshmen, we’re stuck in an awkward in-between time of our lives. We’re too old to be naïve freshmen, but too young to be taken seriously like juniors and seniors. We’re the forgotten middle child of grades.
Our official diagnosis is the sophomore slump. College is no longer new and exciting like it was last year, and we also have too many years left to be excited about graduation. It’s a slump year when we put our heads down and plow through the workload. The good news is our diagnosis is treatable. Instead of dreading the year and simply trying to get through it, we need to stop and smell the roses. I think we can all agree that freshman year went by in the blink of an eye. One moment we were moving into dorms on our first day, and the next day we’re back on campus, a year older and hopefully a year wiser too. The same thing will happen this year and the next year, and nearly every other year for the rest of our lives, so we need to slow down and embrace the sophomore slump. Soon enough, college will be over and we’ll all be wondering where the time has gone. So for now, I encourage us all to revel in the fact that we’re living in dorms, we’re still underclassmen and we don’t have our majors, let alone our lives, figured out. Life is messy and standing around waiting for tomorrow only makes us lose today, so bring it on sophomore slump. We’re ready and waiting.
