College Experience

We’ve all heard the phrase. Sometimes it’s to explain the difficulties of being away from home and taking responsibility for ourselves for the first time. Sometimes it’s an excuse when we party too hard. But it’s the backbone to spending thousands of dollars to go away to a school for education. We all want the “best college experience.”

Many people have the notion that college is going to the best years of our life. We’re young and wild! Taking in wisdom wherever and however we can. In some way it can be. During these first years on our own, we learn a lot about ourselves and about the world. But in my opinion, college isn’t everything and it definitely should not be the absolute best years of our life. Think about it. We graduate when we’re in our early twenties. The average lifespan of the American is 79 years old! Are we really supposed to have the best years in the first third of our lives?

Rather, I’d keep trying to make the next year better than the last. We can get a job or volunteer to change the world. We can get married and have kids. We can tour the world exploring new cultures and meeting new people. Endless possibilities! College is a time when we often have no money, little self-respect, and emotional torment.

My decision about moving off campus instead of staying at the dorms was in heavy tension with the duty to my “college experience.” Needless drama with roommates? Insufficient sleep because of noisy neighbors? Having to share nasty bathrooms and have little space for anything? Why would I want any of these things?

I might bow to the idea that freshmen should go through this pain to gain an understanding about “the real world” and it does give you a better chance to meet friends. But after Freshman year, everyone’s already settled into their own cliques. Finding new friends is much more difficult and is definitely not dependent on where you live. If anything, the only new way to make friends is through work and extracurriculars.

As an outsider, I can tell that Greek life isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. Why is this such a pressure for everyone to join a group when in reality only 25% of students are involved? I mean alright. I may be a little cynical and people do find some lifelong friends in their organizations. But can we agree that it’s another terrible role we have to fill?

I’ve watched a wonderful human being’s self-confidence crushed over the fact that he wasn’t accepted into a fraternity. Chase, a sophomore at Loyola Marymount University, kept asking me, “Am I weird? What’s wrong with me?” A few days later he explained what he believed about college experience. He said, “It is anything that you want it to be. However, there is pressure from everyone around you to be cool, to join a frat, to party. From my experience, college is almost a continuation of high school.”

We all remember how awful high school can be. But we always had hope that our future would be filled with happier days surrounded by better people. That is what we need to continue to hope for instead of dwelling in the glory days of college.