“10 essential skills you need for college”, “A list of all your must-haves”. “Top 20 essentials every college girl needs”. We’ve seen those videos, we’ve read those articles, we’ve saved the Pinterest boards, and at this point probably made our own list too. The tote bag, the water bottle, the emergency makeup kit, the perfect pair of jeans. Everything has been carefully accounted for.
Yet somewhere between deciding how many pairs of shoes we need, or how many notebooks we require we seem to have forgotten the one thing we carry around everywhere, our mind abstractly, our brain quite literally and our emotions. To put it more poetically, our thoughts, fears, expectations, and delusions. Basically the mitochondria of a college body. College doesn’t require things you can just put inside a suitcase, It requires things you have to somehow manufacture within yourself. Unfortunately, there’s no Amazon Prime for emotional resilience, no Sephora for confidence, and no college essentials section where you can simply add the ability to deal with change to your cart.
So perhaps before stepping into campus, there’s another list we should be making. Not a physical one, but a mental packing list-:
(1) The Patience To Coexist
With others, yes, but also with yourself. College is going to bring together people from different places, backgrounds, personalities, ways of thinking. Not everyone will approach life the way you do, and you won’t always understand each other immediately. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes patience simply means giving someone room to be different. Other times it means giving yourself room to have a bad day, make a mistake, or not have everything figured out. You don’t have to understand everything instantly. You just have to be willing to learn, to listen, and coexist.
(2) The Will To Take One More Step
There will be days when you have no idea what you’re doing or days when the assignment is due tomorrow, your social battery is at 2%, and the only thing you want to do is disappear under your blanket. You don’t always need to know how you’ll get through the entire semester. Sometimes you just need enough will to take one more step: go to classes, send the mail, submit the assignment, get out of bed. One more step count.
(3) The Power To Not Let One Thing Become Everything
A bad grade is a bad grade. It does not have to become a statement about your intelligence. A friendship ending is painful. It does not mean you are unlovable. One awkward interaction does not need to become a three-business-day investigation conducted entirely inside your head. College will give you plenty of little things that feel enormous in the moment. Learn to let them be little.
(4) A Healthy Amount Of Delusion
Hear us out. You need the kind of delusion that makes you think, Why not me? The kind that makes you apply for the position even when you think you’re underqualified. Walk into an event alone. Talk to someone first. Try something you’ve never done before. A little irrational confidence can take you surprisingly far.
(5) The Ability To Be Embarrassing And Survive
You will embarrass yourself. You will say something weird. You will trip. You will wave back at someone who wasn’t waving at you. You will probably have at least one interaction that randomly resurfaces in your brain at 3 a.m. six months later, and you will survive. Pack that knowledge.
(6) The Courage To Be Bad At Something
College is not an audition for the role of a person who has everything figured out. You are allowed to be terrible at something before you’re good at it. You are allowed to join a club and realize you have no idea what you’re doing. You are allowed to give a presentation that makes you want to move countries afterwards. Being bad at something is often just the first stage of being better at it.
(7) The Ability To Say No
Not every plan needs your attendance. Not every friendship needs your constant availability. Not every opportunity is your opportunity. And no, you don’t always need to write a paragraph explaining why you can’t make it. Sometimes no, I can’t, is enough.
(8) The Courage To Outgrow People
Some people will be your people for four years. Some people will be your people for four months. Some will exist in your life long enough to teach you something and then disappear. Not every friendship has to last forever to have mattered. College is partly about meeting people and partly about learning when to let people go.
(9) The Ability To Start Again
New semester, new friends, new routine, new version of you. You might change your major, leave a club, make new friends, lose the old ones, realize the person you thought you wanted to become isn’t actually who you want to be. Starting again doesn’t mean you failed the first time. It means you changed, and that’s fine too.
This may, perhaps, be the most important thing to pack:
(10) The Belief That You’ll Figure It Out
Because you probably won’t have everything figured out when you walk onto campus, and that’s okay. You don’t need to know exactly who your best friend will be, what career you’ll have, what version of yourself will emerge, or whether the person you imagined becoming at 18 is actually the person you will be at 21.
Maybe college isn’t about arriving with a perfectly packed mind. Maybe it’s about building one as you go. So yes, pack the tote bag, pack the stationery, pack the emergency snacks, the outfit you’ve planned three weeks in advance. But somewhere between the physical essentials, remember to bring along a little peace, a little patience, a little audacity, a little delusion, a little courage, and a lot of willingness to keep going. Because the most important things you need for college probably won’t fit in your suitcase anyway.