After a year off of school to decompress from making the complete wrong decision about where I was going to college, these first couple weeks of the semester have been challenging (to say the least) in a huge number of ways. Not only am I having to go back to doing actual school work for which you get grades instead of having a full time job and getting paid actual money, but I feel like I’ve been thrown into some sort of social experiment. I was used to heading home from my job on my own every day, making dinner for myself, going on mini trips to visit friends and family, and generally having a whole lot of freedom. Now, I’m with at least one other person pretty much at all times – we share living spaces, bathrooms, common rooms, kitchens, and there’s an enormous amount of pressure to be doing something all of the time. If you don’t, that rad FOMO kicks in…and we all know how that feels.
When looking for a school to transfer to during a year off after my freshman year of college, I was looking for a campus with an amazing program and an amazing community, and I’ve definitely found that here at Loyola. Even though I knew that I was going to be attending a highly ranked university, with a larger student body full of happy, sunshine-y Californians, I don’t think I was prepared for just how much energy it would actually require. Today marks a month since I moved into my apartment on campus, and here’s what I’ve noticed about my transition back into college life after playing adult for over a year:
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Being a naturally introverted person who had just come out of a year of basically living alone, I was going to have to get used to being around others (specifically having a roommate) really quickly. When you share a little cube stuffed with two twin beds with another girl, things can get dicey. Thankfully, I lucked out in an unbelievable way with my random assignment, but this doesn’t mean compromises didn’t have to be made. Different class schedules, social situations, cleaning habits, and even boy habits have to be mediated between the two of you. You’ve got to be constantly checking in with this other person if something you’re going to do is alright – this goes from putting up decorations to whose turn it is to take the trash out.
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Aside from just the roommate interactions, there is the entire social scene of college that comes into play that very first weekend of the semester. Since I’m a transfer student, I was entering into sophomore year feeling like a freshman; everyone else had established friendships and connections with one another last year, and I was intimidated by that so much that it forced me to act as if I were extremely extroverted. I talked to my neighbors whenever I saw them, said yes to any social situation I was invited to, and forced myself to strike up conversations at parties and in my classes whenever I could. Through those painful tasks, I managed to quickly make friends and become part of different groups, which I’m ecstatic about, but it has been nothing short of absolutely exhausting.
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And finally….the schoolwork. You would think that this wouldn’t come as quite so much of a shock to me – I’d already done a year of college, I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. Unfortunately, the level of my last school combined with a full year of not thinking about schoolwork in any way, shape or form left me unprepared for how hard the workload here would hit me. And when I say hit me, I mean it hit me like a train. Suddenly, I had what felt like 1,000 pages of reading for this one class, 50 papers due within a week in another, I needed to prepare 20 million discussion questions for the next… okay, okay, so I’m exaggerating a little bit. It was probably only like 500 pages of reading. Either way, I was suddenly just short of what felt like drowning in work. So, I’m still getting used to that “time management” thing that everyone else seems to have a handle on.
I know that I made the right choice in coming to Loyola Marymount, and once I figure out how to balance all of these new, exciting, and overwhelming aspects of my life a little bit better than I have so far, this is going to continue to be the very best chapter of my life so far.