So you’re in your sophomore year of college. You’re not a naïve little freshman anymore, but you’re not quite an upperclassman either. You feel out of place surrounded by overdressed freshmen girls at all the same frat parties with the same overused themes, but you’re not old enough or ambitious enough to do anything else with your Friday night. It’s a weird limbo, and the “sophomore slump” becomes more understandable each and every day, but luckily the “Parks and Recreation” crew knows exactly how we feel.
1. The semester is about to start and as you kiss your parents goodbye, you promise them that you’ll make good choices and whatever else they want you to do as they threaten to stop paying your tuition and drag your sorry a** home if you mess around.
2. It’s the first day of classes and that one professor actually starts lecturing and teaching like it’s not called “syllabus week” for a reason.
3. It’s the Sunday morning after syllabus week, and after a week of doing virtually nothing productive and going out with the squad almost every night, you start to feel reality creeping up on you. Luckily it’s Sunday morning, which means brunch!
4. You feel like you’re better than dining hall food at this point, but you’re still too lazy / incompetent to use kitchen appliances like a functional adult.
5. Your roommates remind you of the number of days left until spring break, and you realize you really need to stop napping and start going to the gym.
6. You’re a couple weeks into classes and the late nights and early mornings are starting to get to you.
7. You have a big paper due next week and suddenly you forget everything you have ever learned about anything, ever.
8. You and your crew go to yet another frat house party and try to wiggle your way through the sea of freshmen, pretending there is no way you were that awkward and weird just last year.
9. Your parents insist on FaceTiming you on a Sunday afternoon after a long weekend, and then comment on how tired / disheveled you look right now.
10. You’re almost a junior now, so you decide it’s time to actually make a trip to the career center on campus, hoping they can figure out your life for you.
11. Then Grandma calls and asks if there are any men in your life these days (she’s basically wondering why you don’t have a boyfriend yet…) and you're like.
12. You have 57 exams, 32 papers, 27 projects and a 1,000-page novel all due within 24 hours, and you suddenly start to reevaluate your life and your ambitions for the future.
13. Your professors start talking about finals, but you swear the semester just started yesterday. You look at the exam study guide and realize you know close to nothing, so with tears in your eyes you brush the dust off your $100 textbooks and crack them open for the first time.
14. You and your roommates reminisce about all those Tuesday and Wednesday nights when you went out, when you really should have been staying in and studying because now it’s all catching up to you.
15. As you finally hand in your last final to your professor, you flash him / her a dashing smile, hoping they will pity you and be gentle when grading your exam.
16. And just like that, you’re one step closer to adulthood and the real world. As you reflect on your first two years of college, you wonder how much has really changed.
17. The first one of your friends leaves to go home for break, and you’re in denial that another semester of college has already gone by.
18. But you know you’ll all be back together soon enough, doing it all over again and ignoring the fact that the real adult world is slowly creeping closer and closer.
Maybe you'll actually get your life together this semester. But that's what junior year is for, right?
