As my first weeks of college are coming to a close and everything feels familiar, I notice myself in a different spot than a lot of my peers. So many of my more distant friends are living their own version of the college experience and it differs from mine so greatly. This has made me wonder, why do people even come to college?
I know why I'm here, and it's not to get blackout drunk on all daily alliterations of "thirsty Thursday" type activities. I don't think this makes me particularly boring, either. College is expensive. Alcohol is expensive. I don't seem to have the time or funds to afford to skip my 9:30 every day because I'm too hungover to qualify as an alive human being. I know the idea of college as a place of learning and higher education and not an open bar is foreign to a lot of people, but for me and at least a few of my friends, we came to learn the stuff and leave with a degree and maybe even (gasp) a job offer. It seems that for a lot of people these ideas have been forgotten in the midst of freedom and fake IDs.
Everyone is familiar with the "college experience." It's a term that everyone can't wait to call their own by the end of their junior year in high school. But once I got to college I saw that the most important experience I was going to have was finding myself. The best friend I was going to make was me, and the only person I needed to do one hundred percent right by was myself. I bet no one came to college for that reason or those types of realizations, and that's okay, because neither did I.
I guess the things to consider when trying to understand why people come to college is that there is no answer. No one moves out of their house, city or even state to go learn under a decided major for the same reason. I just like knowing I'm not the only one who didn't come to get messy and have to spend mornings contemplating my life choices. But, whatever, to each their own.
College is a cool place and an opportunity a lot of people will never get, so before you make your decision, or even change it, consider what you want to get out of your experience and what you want to learn. College is all about learning and hardly any of it comes from the classroom or overpriced books. All the most important knowledge to be gained comes from yourself and everything you realize when you go through everything you're going to go through.
So maybe there is no answer to why anyone goes to college, no definitive one at least. But that's that.
