Anodyness

When I think about my college experience up until this point, I have mixed feelings of achievement, frustration and confusion. I started out young and ready, excited to work my way up from the cheeky undergraduate years to the top of the post-Doctorate mountain. I started off in Psychology – I was intrigued by the mind, I wanted to memorize the works of Freud, Jung, Fromm and Chomsky from front to back – and my love of the subject excited me and made me hopeful about my prospects. I started off at a small University on the Western side of Wisconsin. There, I found that most people I encountered didn’t share the same desire to create, learn and build community. Of course they didn’t – I was in Wisconsin, not even the good part, and I was expecting a bunch of agricultural students to aim for a bloom of intellectual creativity and a drive to go beyond what was already known.

I left that school after my first semester. After I left, I experienced a rather dark period in my life – one of only a few – and wound up in community college. I spent several hours there among people who were just trying to get by, whose lives and finances and personal situations had led them to strive for at least some sort of academic record more worthy than a high school diploma. I applied to a University in my hometown, which is much larger and much more diverse than you might find in western Wisconsin, and planned to continue with my studies come the next fall.

Through twists and turns, I’ve managed to stretch my four-year degree into a five-year degree. My first semester at the new University ended up with me on academic probation, a feat I’d never once even come close to reaching throughout my entire k-12 career, and a damaged sense of stability. I switched my major to English, something I knew and loved. I started climbing my way back up. I began to learn again, though I struggled still through a relationship that took everything I knew about the human mind and intimacy and broke it into shards.

Three years later, my GPA is back where it should be, my personal life has improved for the better, and I’m due to graduate in the spring. Yet still, another challenge rears it’s ugly head.

Beyond the academic trials and tribulations one might face in college, little is really said about how being in college will affect every other aspect of your life, whether it be for better or worse. When somebody says, “Expect to be poor for a while,” don’t just smile and nod and keep looking through your rosy glasses at the diploma floating above you in the sky. When somebody says, “You might gain some weight or start using tobacco, alcohol and caffeine to make your way through college,” take out the word “might” and add, “will.”

But what about the other things they don’t tell you about? I’ve outlined a few things about college that a lot of people just don’t really mention.

• Your personal relationships are really weird. Nevermind the whole bit about finding your best friends in college; that may happen to some people, but you can’t find one best friend without going through handfuls of odd, wacky, unusual people. You’ll have a friend who is able to polish off an entire bottle of hard liquor within one night, end up in the ER and come back drinking and smoking strong the next day. You’ll have friends who can’t seem to figure out what they’re doing or where they’re going, and they may seem to run around in circles. This is probably because their head is going in circles and they haven’t quite figured out how to but the emergency brake on. Your old friends will change, drop out of college, get married, move away, make new friends or take on a new job that seems completely out of line. Friends become strangers, strangers become friends. Everybody is trying to impress everybody and nobody wants to be left out of the game. Think of it as high school, amplified and fed by confusion, depression, lust and an extreme hopefulness about life.
• College may not actually be for you. Everybody is told at some point in their life that the best way to get out into the real world and start pulling in enough money to retire at 55 is a college degree. Well, that may have been true in our parent’s time, but today the outlook is not quite as good. In fact, for a lot of industries, an education beyond the Bachelor’s is almost vital to a good career. But what if you get to college, and instead of finding yourself daydreaming of your Biochem lab the next day, you find yourself daydreaming about everything else you could be doing with your time? You see, while you’re stuck in lecture taking down notes that you don’t even understand because you’re too tired from your late-night cram session to even concentrate on the fact that your socks are mismatched and the sweater you’re wearing hasn’t been washed in two months, you could be gaining experience somewhere in an industry that you’re actually interested in. Maybe you want to be hairdresser, or maybe you want to be an entrepreneur and start your own software developing company. Maybe you have a real knack for crafty things, or perhaps you want to see the world as a flight attendant. Maybe you’re in college because someone pushed you to be there and it’s just not working out for you. Whatever it might be, there are just some people who weren’t meant to go to college, and it’s not even because they’re not smart enough or talented enough to make it. Some of the most successful people have been able to create success without spending four years in an institution, and those people would probably tell you that if it doesn’t feel like it’s helping you, you probably shouldn’t be there.
• You will be poor. Well, unless you’re lucky enough to live with mom and dad, or if you live off of campus commodities such as dorm rooms and meal plans. But you’ll still probably be poor. This connects in a small way to the idea that college may not be the right thing for you. If you’re keeping a weird schedule and can’t hold down any kind of solid, reliable job, your finances are going to be wobbly and you’re probably going to make a lot of mistakes. First mistake: owning a car. I understand it’s important for some people to own a car if they live in a more rural area, or if they live at home and have to commute from the suburbs, but for the most part, if you’re living in a large enough city, it’s a dumb idea to have a car. Buy a bike, get a bus pass, carpool with someone else. Even if you’re not paying a loan on the car, gas prices, maintenance, tickets, and any accidents are going to take what little money you have and dump it into the sewer. Cars eat money, and this is something a lot of younger people don’t understand. Second mistake: personal debt. I know that it is sometimes inevitable to have debt coming out of college, and for some people, the advantages of having a job after college will outweigh the fact that they now have $50,000 in debt  hanging over their heads. It’s hard to think about that kind of money when you’re signing off the promissory notes. When it comes to college, unless you had a good fund set up for you when you were born or you have a nice relative who really likes you bunches, you’re going to be poor during and probably after college. I don’t know why the pursuit of knowledge has to become a financial penalty for us, but the system doesn’t seem to be improving in the favor of the nation’s young.
• Your body is going to take a beating. You see it all the time: the kid who gets drunk every night and seems to have a great time until he shows up to 8:00 lecture with fatigued eyes and perhaps a few mysterious bruises; the girl who is too busy to take twenty minutes to pull together a healthful meal, so she stops at Taco Bell or the nearest pizza-by-the-slice palace and scarf it down before her next class begins; the group of friends enjoying a cigarette break between lectures or during a study group, sucking down one or two or three cigarettes to get their hands to stop shaking and their minds to calm down; the dedicated student who sets aside at least three nights per week to stay up from dusk until dawn to get all of his work done because, you know, he just can’t sleep until his homework is complete. The pressure manifests itself in ways that people can hardly seem to believe: you get acne, even though your skin has been clear your entire life; your pants stop fitting you the way they used to; your lungs start to ache from the sheer number of stress cigarettes you consume; you start to age a little faster and notice that your hair is coming out in large volumes. If you think your senior year of high school is stressful, your college years are 12th grade squared. You may not recognize yourself at the end of it.
• Personal crises are not abnormal. Whether they be caffeine-and-sleep-deprivation-induced, the product of some deep-seated fear of failure or a moment of clarity gone wrong, personal crises are actually quite normal and I think it may be hard to find someone with a college degree who has not gone through some sort of personal crisis. The worst part is that there are no rules when it comes to crises, and there may be nothing you can do except face it head on and evaluate the cause behind your upset. More often than not, it has something to do with your studies. Maybe the system is throwing you through a loop and you’ve  just found out that your entire transcript has been rendered invalid because they forgot to tell you the department was closing. Maybe you owe some amount of money, like $200 or so, and can’t pay it, so the college refuses to allow you to continue with your schooling until that $200 is paid off. Maybe your lover just left you for the person down the hall from you and it’s too much to see their bicycle parked outside the building when you know they’re not there to see you. These things can severely dampen your progress, but more importantly, they can affect you on a personal level and deeply change the way you’re able to function in your life or warp your perceptions on the way things should be. Having a big test the next day that you forgot about doesn’t help anything, either.
• Growing up is really cool, but also really scary, and kind of annoying too. You remember how fun it was when you were 15 to imagine living on your own without rules, a curfew or expectations from other adults? I know I always dreamt of the romanticized version of what my life actually is, and it’s only now that I realize that all of this growing up and dealing with having to decide what you want to do with the rest of your life at age 18 is actually not that cool at all. The moment of realization hits everyone at different times, but it almost always has to deal with expectations left unmet, learning to deal with living with strangers, budgeting so that you can afford to eat, keeping your home clean and free of health hazards, moving around a lot and feeling completely uprooted, changing your mind, learning about the real dangers and costs of alcohol and realizing that life as a teenager really wasn’t so bad at all. Actually, now that I think about it, life was great when I was 15, because all I had to do was take out the trash, clean the dishes, take care of my cats and maybe rake some leaves. Sure, high school was a drag, but compared to what we’re facing, I’d go back and do it all again.

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