The “Sophomore Slump” is real. It's that feeling hiding behind those long nights at the library, the obnoxious, overwhelming busy work, and the general lack of care being given about any school work in sight. Dropped GPAs, an epidemic of stress and anxiety and a wonderful pile of desolation are key aspects of sophomore year.
So, it wouldn’t be difficult to say I will miss sophomore year. A year that has brought me almost unprecedented amounts of fear, disappointment, and anxiety. I frolic into junior year with the wind behind my sails with the knowledge that I am no longer a doomed sophomore.
You might be asking yourself why I have such a passionate hatred of the second year of college. Well, the answer is simple. Sophomore year is like prison. You heard me, attending a small liberal art school for two years is equivalent to being locked in a maximum security prison and having one’s rights taken away. It’s simple. Your sophomore year is when both the work level increases and the escape from such work decreases, leaving you trapped between a horrible weight of work and almost no way to escape it. All work and no play, Jack will indeed become a dull boy.
Lest we also forget that sophomore year is when many majors begin to introduce the harder, more intense, classes. Going beyond the simple introduction classes, this is where the work starts to get really hard and god forbid you don’t like what you’re doing and have to transfer.
I also loved (I didn’t actually) the constant lack of anything to do in order to escape the grind. Upperclassmen go to bars, but what do we younger folk have? Terrible house parties that get broken up because some frat guy decided that throwing up on a cop car was the most optimal way to demonstrate his lacking manhood? None of these facts have prevented any of my peers from drinking themselves out of the stress that crushes them every day. Remember, it isn’t alcoholism if someone uses a weak joke to justify their binge drinking.
The dorms also don’t make sophomore year any better. It is horrible that as an adult I still have to share a communal shower with two other people. How can we also forget the paper thin walls that refuse to hide anything whether it be the loud echoes of love-making or the weird wrestling my neighbors like to do at two in the morning. My favorite is how my dorm likes to shake every time the wind blows too hard like it’s about to explode. Wonderful.
Finally, the worst part of sophomore year is registering the fact that soon you will be joining the ranks of other tax paying adults whether or not you want to. You’ll have to find a job, a house and a life, whether or not you can. Your precious college time is highly limited and increasingly running out. More than that is your youth.
