Around this time of the year, high school seniors around the country are getting their college acceptance letters. They can picture it: packing up their lives and having their parents drop them off in their dorm room for the first time, ready to start their lives. Looking back at that time in your life, it’s almost funny how different your college experience has been from what you thought it would to be. As you geared up for graduation, you thought you knew what to expect when you went to college. Adults say that this is the best time in your life: it’s when you grow up, when you make your lifelong friends, when you find yourself. You thought you knew what college would be like, but the second you stepped on campus you realized that there were things that no one quite prepared you for.
1. College is hard.
This seems like a given, but college is much more difficult than anything high school could have prepared you for. At first your schedule looks awesome— only two or three classes a day, no classes on wednesdays, so much time to spend exploring your new home and hanging out with your friends. Then the work piles up. All of the sudden teachers are asking so much of you. You have to read entire novels before class, your handouts are upward of 50 pages of dense material, they have to give you readings just to teach you how to do the readings, and the worst thing is, no one actually checks to make sure it’s done. You can choose to not do one bit of homework during the semester, but it will come back to bite you in the ass on that one test that basically constitutes your entire grade. You’ll spend more time in the library than you spend in your dorm, and if you don’t break down into work-induced stress tears at least once during your first semester then you’re doing college wrong.
2. The first semester can be really lonely.
Time and time again you’ve heard that college is the place to meet new people and make new friends— and it is. But what you didn’t expect was how long it would take to actually meet those people. Everyone’s college experience is different: some people meet their good friends within the first few weeks, while others don’t find their niche until second semester or even sophomore year. Don’t worry if you aren’t making friends right away. Nothing is wrong with you. Everyone has that moment when they look around at all the new faces on their dorm floor and think, “Oh my god, I’m living with these people and I don’t even know who they are.” Good friendships are not made overnight. They take time, but looking through pictures on Facebook and hearing stories from your high school friends can make you feel like there is something wrong with you if you haven’t found that stable friend group yet. You’re not the only one, trust me.
3. Breaking up with your high school S.O. is more complicated than you thought.
The most common advice that people say they’d give their high school selves is to break up with their high school boyfriend/girlfriend. There are billions of people in the world, and college is going to give you the opportunity to meet people who are so different from those who you grew up knowing in your hometown. It’s hard to move forward when you’re still clinging on to the past, and your S.O. can really hold you back from exploring your new life. You heard this and thought it made so much sense, that it was as simple as agreeing to live your own lives and parting ways as amicable friends, bringing nothing to school with you but the pleasant memories of the time you spent together. Not so much. There are feelings involved. You may be in love, or you may just want to cling to the security you’ve had with this person during high school. Wether you chose to break up or stay together, the decision is not as black-and-white as you thought it would be, and it’s going to be messy.
4. Staying with your high school S.O. might actually be better for you.
Sometimes staying together can be the complete opposite of what you’ve been warned about. If your relationship is healthy, having a long distance relationship can be the ideal situation. Yes, it’s hard to be away from each other, and your weekends together are far too short. Petty fights will arise over the outfits you wear to frat parties or your newfound drinking habits, and your usually not-so-jealous S.O. will drive himself (and you) crazy about the harmless boy living on your floor that you like to study with, but these things are minor if you allow yourselves to work through them and get past it. The great thing is that, by going to separate schools, you have the opportunity to learn who you are without each other while still having the security of knowing that he or she is still there for you. There’s something amazing about being able to go out all day exploring and making new friends, and then coming back to your dorm at night and calling to the person you love. Despite common perception, all long distance relationships are not doomed. Whether you’re in it for the long-run or heading straight to the turkey-dump, the best advice to follow is not to ruin something good because you anticipate bad things in the future. Take everything as it comes, problems and all, and if you can’t make it work then you can have that conversation later. If your relationship is strong then having your S.O. can make acclimating to college a million times easier.
5. You had no idea what you were looking for in college.
It doesn’t matter whether you went on three college tours or 23, you had no idea what to really look for. Tours tend to focus on the big picture stuff about going to college: dorms, classrooms and dining. If you’ve gone on more than two or three tours, you’ve noticed that the schools start to blend together in your mind. Sure, the layout is different at every school, but the essentials are largely similar. A dorm is a dorm, a classroom is a classroom, and food is food (a lot of schools are catered by the same company, so what’s the difference?). Yes, that is all very important, but there are a million little things that high school seniors don’t ever think about. What are the hours at the health center? Is it free? What kind of meal can I get with a meal swipe? You accept transferred credits from any accredited institution, but how easy is it really to transfer credits? How reliable is the shuttle system? Do you even have a shuttle system? These are the things you really find yourself complaining about now that you’re actually here.
6. Leaving home is harder than you thought.
Growing up almost everyone itches to get out of their hometown and get as far away from our parents as possible. At 18, a four-hour drive between home and school doesn’t sound that bad. Actually, it sounds great since your parents can just stop in whenever they want. Even if you like being able to go home, a two-hour train ride or an hour and a half plane ride don’t sound terrible at all. The problem hits when you get to school and experience that first wave of homesickness. You realize that your parents can’t just hop in the car to come take you out to lunch, and you can’t just leave for the day to go see your siblings and your dog at home. You don’t have time and plane/train tickets are expensive. Going home for breaks is a pain because hours or even days of your vacations are wasted on transportation. You realize that being close to home would have had it advantages, and that maybe you wouldn’t mind seeing your family every once in a while. Suddenly, your hometown doesn’t seem boring anymore— it’s comforting. Distance can be great, but college is really when you start to appreciate how good you had it at home.
7. Peer pressure is not as obvious as you learned in school.
No one is going to tell you that you’re a loser if you don’t drink. All the “cool kids” are not smoking marijuana. If someone offers you something and you decline, no one really cares. In college, peer pressure presents itself is different, in more subtle ways. No one is going to make you drink, but you know that if you go to the party and stay sober then you are automatically designated the group mom (no one wants to sign up to look after their drunk friend vomiting in the quad). If you don’t want to drink too much but see all of your friends playing slap-cup, it can be hard not to join them. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is still a thing here, maybe even more than before. With all the pressure to make college the best time of your life, it becomes hard to pass up on opportunities to go out. So if you have a big paper due monday it may be very difficult to convince yourself that it’s okay to stay in and do work instead of going to a frat party (spoiler alert: The frat party is just a bunch of people you don’t know getting drunk, dancing, and throwing up. Nothing especially exciting happened, and a million more parties just like it will be thrown before the end of the semester). In the end, peer pressure comes from yourself, not others around you. No one truly cares how much you drink or if you have to stay in for a night because, well, they’re too worried about getting themselves drunk. Pressure comes from the standards and expectations you set for yourself, and college freshman should be warned that it is okay to step back once in a while— they have nothing to prove.
College is a difficult transition for everyone whether it lasts for the first week or the first semester, but freshman don’t understand that they are sent away from high school with expectations of their college experience that aren’t going to happen instantaneously. There are things they don’t know, things they are going to learn along the way, and that’s okay. No one is prepared for college, but when you figure it out it really is the best time of your life. There’s a lot of things you aren’t told, but the one piece of advice you’ll hear again and again but ignore anyway? Don’t drink the jungle juice.