1. It’s so hard to make friends.
This is the weirdest thing that I didn’t expect. Even people who you seem to hit it off in class with. There’s a lot of talk about how you want to keep in touch or hang out after the semester is over, but the number of times that that actually turns into anything beyond a Facebook friendship is really low. Maybe I’m just being naive, but if you suggest that we hang out, I’m expecting that you mean it, just as I do if I’m the one who suggests it.
2. The most fun classes are the ones which require a lot of in class discussion.
This might seem like an obvious one for some people, but for someone who isn’t as comfortable with public speaking, this was a surprise. Being a writer, I take a lot of workshop courses, and those, while forcing me to put myself out there more than your standard math class might, have undoubtedly been my favorites. A lot of these workshops remind me of improv comedy: a classmate could say something ridiculous and others around them would just run with it.
3. Professors can make or break a class, regardless of the subject.
It doesn’t seem to matter what the subject is, when I’ve had professors who were obviously passionate about the topics that they teach, it’s not boring. I’ve never been someone who enjoys math, but I have had one really enjoyable math class during my college career. On the other hand, there have also been courses in things I love normally that sometimes dragged or left me struggling to stay awake because the professor just didn’t seem to care much about what they were teaching.
4. Professors are, for the most part, really accommodating.
This is where high school got it wrong. I spent what seems like half of my time in high school hearing about all the ways that college would be different. One of the main points my teachers loved to continue to bring up (mainly the more hard-nosed ones) was the idea that professors don’t want to help or don’t care about their students. Granted, I’ve always gone to schools where the class sizes are small, so maybe that contributes to it, but I can only think of one professor that I’ve ever had that wasn’t understanding about anything.
5. There are so many classes for niche interests.
It’s insane how many different things you can get college credit for doing. Because high school focuses so much on English, science, math, and history, I expected going into college for it to be more of the same. A few years later and I’ve taken courses on all kinds of things I could never have expected, like fencing and digital music composition, just to name a few. I might not do much with either of those things in the future, but they were really cool experiences, anyway.
