From the time that you’re old enough to even understand the concept of college, people tell you how great of an experience it’s going to be. They reminisce about classes, late nights and all of the nostalgic memories that came with the territory. From what you’ve heard, college is supposed to be a wild ride. So, you move into your dorm building with high expectations and a pressure to make sure that you aren’t wasting your life while in your "prime."
When you don’t have the same experiences that your parents, your older friends or other people have had, you start to worry that somehow you’re missing out on the true college life. I’m here to tell you that it’s okay.
The great “college experience” is not as universal as you have been led to think. People have misconceptions about going to live on campus at a university, believing that their lives are about to change in dramatic ways. With the expectations that you have going into your first year at college, you might feel like you have to live up to what everybody around you has been talking about for your entire life. You start to stress out, believing that if you’re not conforming to other people’s narrow view of what college should be, then you’re not fully enjoying your time there.
Simply put, your college experience is whatever you want it to be. Do you want to join a fraternity or sorority? Do you want to go out every weekend and party whenever possible? Do you want to stay in on Friday nights and host movie marathons with your roommates? All of these options are okay. What isn’t okay is when you do something, not because you want to, but because you feel like you have to in order to fulfill some notion of a “college experience.” It is entirely up to you—a good college experience is made up of whatever is most important to you.
The “college experience” that everybody talks about is a myth, because there is no way of defining what makes any event experienced in college a worthwhile one. Don’t feel pressured to live your life a certain way because you’re in a certain environment—conforming to something that you don’t think is fun or worthwhile is surely the opposite of what would constitute a “good” college experience, anyway.
College isn’t about making sure that you live your life to the fullest, because there is no single definition of what “living life to the fullest” even means. Instead, college is about doing whatever makes you the happiest. You have the freedom and ability to figure out who you are in an entirely new environment with entirely new people. That is what should be considered the “college experience”—finding out what makes you unique, learning what it is that makes you important in the world.
Feeling pressured to act a certain way or do certain things because you feel like it is what you have to do is not the key to a successful college experience. Striving towards happiness and contentment in life is the ultimate goal. You don’t have to fit into a narrow view of what college is supposed to be like; all that you have to do is be yourself, and the rest will eventually fall into place. To put it short, there is no “college experience” standard that you have to live up to—how your time at college unfolds depends entirely on you.
