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How “Fangirl” Defined My First Year at College

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Dickinson chapter.

It’s often recognized that there is a great fear of the unknown. And one of the great, terrifying unknowns in life is college. In high school, college was something that I was extremely intimidated by. I’m rather introverted, so I feared that I wouldn’t be able to make friends of find much comfort in a new place. However, in the spring of my junior year in high school I read a book that helped change my outlook on college. This book was Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell.

Fangirl was about a girl named Cath who enters her first year of college, and I connected to her character more than almost any other character I’ve ever read about. She was introverted like me, and she loved to write and wanted to go to school to improve her writing. She was a bit more introverted than me, and wrote fan fiction, which is not a genre that I personally write in, but for the most part I felt that we were very similar.

Quickly, Cath began to face problems that I greatly feared I would face myself in college. She wasn’t making any friends and she was receiving negative feedback in a class that she was most excited about. Her social anxiety was also becoming something that got in the way of her doing things she wanted and even needed to do. She was so afraid of talking to new people that she wouldn’t ask where the cafeteria was so she could eat a good meal.

 Cath eventually overcame these struggles throughout the book for she ended up making deep, meaningful friendships and she received recognition in her class for something she worked hard on. She overcame her struggles—things I was afraid I would struggle with, and it made me feel that I too could be successful in college.

This book is completely fictional. Cath is completely fictional. Yet that didn’t matter. While she was fictional her problems were real. They were real things that I was afraid of, and somehow, the fact that this fictional person similar to me overcame them made me believe that I too could overcome those issues. That’s why one of the first times I ever felt comfortable with the idea of college was after reading this book.

I'm a first year in college at Dickinson.
Julia Mercado

Dickinson '20

Julia is an English major who just loves to write. You can normally find her looking for the next Netflix original to watch... or coming up with her own script ideas. With Her Campus, she hopes to reach out to other college women like her!