Now that I've been back in school for a month and have had plenty of time to make fun of all the freshmen walking around campus with their orientation lanyards and naive optimism, I actually feel sorry for them and want to help. What can I say? I'm a giver. I am sharing the 3 biggest misconceptions I had about college when I was a freshman. I finally know now what everyone else around me has known for years...that I'm an idiot. So don't follow in my footsteps freshmen, wake up every single day with the goal to not be as hopelessly pathetic as I was, which shouldn't be too hard.
Mistake # 1 I thought I would get much smarter.
I remember being so confused in classes my freshman year, just having no idea what was going on and thinking hey, it can only get better from here. First semester of my freshman year I took a Intro to Public Policy. To this day I still don't know what public policy is. In my defense, I continually ask other people what it is, and they don't know either! Anyways, at that time I was so sure that as I finished general education classes and moved on to my actual major and area of interest I would understand the subject material better. This was my first mistake. Every year I manage to not get kicked out of college, I only get more and more confused in my classes. I realized this was a trend earlier this semester when I found out that all of the girls who speak up, understand and actually do the readings in my social justice class are sophomores. I hadn't even had a college political science class when I was their age and here they are lapping me on the philosophical doctrines of Plato and Nozick. My mistake was over-estimating myself, since then I have adjusted my expectations accordingly. And I can assure that Cs, do indeed, get degrees.
Mistake # 2 I thought I would love my roommate.
Another major misconception I had about college...I for some reason thought that I would quickly become best friends with my roommate. I tried to keep myself realistic and realize that we probably wouldn't be actual best friends until like day 3, but I was totally unprepared for what I actually discovered. Everyone has different talents. Some people are good at math, some people are good at art, other people are good at knowing which scent of hand soap to buy at Bath and Body Works, and some people just have a knack for getting really crappy roommates. In case you couldn't guess, I'm the last one. In retrospect, my roommate freshman year wasn't so bad. It just took me living through the misery that was my sophomore year roommate to realize that. Now, both of my roommates were perfectly nice girls. I would just rather shave my head bald than have to live with either of them again.
My freshman year roommate just had a weird work schedule so she would come home at like 3 in the morning and sleep till at least 12, not too bad. Of course there was that one time that she left broken glass all over my rug, that was sweet of her. She also may have punched a hole in our suite's bathroom window. The worst part was that she was a vegetarian, so our room, especially her stuff, had a certain funk to it. An inescapable funk. To this day I still don't trust vegetarians, although to be fair, I never really have.
But this was nothing compared to the torture that was sophomore year. My roommate was actually insane. To this day I swear she was majoring in Netflix, I only saw her doing actual work twice during the year. Other than that, she basically stayed on her laptop watching entire seasons of shows at a time. She was in our room about 99% of the time and went to bed around 9 every night only to wake up at 10 or 11 the next morning. This was all pretty minor stuff. What was particularly enraging was her attitude. She was fond of slamming doors and often called her parents to talk crap about me. But the final straw was about a week before the end of the school year.
I was sitting on her bed because I had several friends over watching a movie and there was nowhere else to sit. I didn't think she would care and didn't think she would be coming back that day. She walks in, sees me, leaves her suitcase, walks back out. My friends all make jokes about how she is going to kill me but they aren't so much joking as they are warning me to leave the state. Long story short, one week before we were moving out of the room forever and she will never sleep in a twin extra long bed again, she bought an entire new set of bedding. She said that I knew how she felt about germs and that I was so disrespectful. I knew she liked for things to be clean but I had no idea she had an actual psychological disorder. I mean she should have brought me a doctor's note or something. Needless to say, we never spoke again and lived happily ever after.
Mistake # 3 I thought I would make friends.
This one was probably the best let down. I have made less than a dozen new friends in college that I spend time with every week. Now granted, had I gone to another college this could have changed. But I was lucky enough to come to college with several of my best friends from high school. We're all still best friends. And I wouldn't have it any other way. But honestly. I really should have known that regardless of the circumstances, I wasn't going to make new friends in college. It took me long enough to trick my current friends into socializing with me, way longer than the four short years I have here.
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