Now that I’m over halfway through my second semester of university, I am feeling especially nostalgic. Starting the first semester last August, I didn’t have any sort of expectations for what the “college experience” was supposed to be. Unironically, I planned to live, laugh, love my way through the rest of my educational career. Although I’ve almost completed two semesters, that plan hasn’t really changed, even though my perspective has.
One of the first things I learned at school was that I need to rotate my morning alarms every few weeks. For the first three months, my ringtone was one of the programmed iPhone sounds, Daybreak. Now, that sound reminds me of Austin in the fall, but listening to it wake me up every day at six in the morning might always give me the “heebie jeebies.”
Another thing that I learned while being in college is that nobody really cares. I had an incredibly sparse wardrobe in high school, so when I started out at the University of Texas, I was still trying to figure out my personal style. In fact, I’m still trying to figure it out. At first, going to class made me feel self-conscious because my outfits didn’t feel cohesive to me. I didn’t know much about fashion, so I decided to look around at what everyone else was wearing and tried to mirror them. Thinking about it harder and harder, I realized that most of the time, I couldn’t remember the outfits that my classmates would wear. If I couldn’t remember what they were wearing, then it must be the case that they wouldn’t remember what I was wearing either. With this in mind, I felt freer to experiment with my clothing choices.
This idea doesn’t only go for fashion—nobody cares if you trip in the road on the way to class or if you accidentally drop a few dishes in front of the dish return. (I may or may not have done those things.) The point is that there’s no need to be self-conscious if everyone is doing their own thing.
Finally, I learned that college coursework is not high school coursework. I had heard people say this multiple times, but it doesn’t feel true until it’s confronting you in reality. The first time I ever took a college midterm, it was for a class that even the professor dubbed “easy.” I prepared for this test a little more than I would on an average basis, but looking at the exam questions was legitimately a shock to my system. Suddenly, up was down and left was right. Needless to say, I will never allow myself to be that unprepared again.
Many attend university for the education and the experience of being independent in a somewhat controlled environment. I’ve learned a lot over the past six months. Although it’s been a truly humbling experience, I hope to evolve as a person even more over the next three years.