During your four or so years in college, you meet an immense amount of people and it’s strange how the more you encounter, the more it actually begins to seem as though you’re meeting the same few characters over and over. Lately I’ve seen a lot of lists floating around that tell me the types of people that I will so certainly stumble upon during college. Surprisingly, I really have bumped into quite a few of them – the overachiever, the kid that’s too cool for school, the one whose paper you peer reviewed and who couldn’t go a sentence without writing about how amazing he is (maybe that one’s just me). The thing about acquaintances is that you probably never go further than labeling them as that one kid you were told you you’d meet in college and did. Well, here I am to predict where they will (potentially) be in ten years.
The Busybody
She’s late to class, every class. “Sorry, I had a meeting.” She holds board positions in three different clubs, has internships lined up for years, and is taking a full course load in the meantime. In ten years, she’ll be in a strained marriage with two kids, both of whom have been brought up in day care. She’ll be president of a major company, and will be the ringleader of the local book club. She hasn’t had her breakdown yet, but it’s coming. Once she begins seeing a counselor, she’ll take some time off, spend some quality time with her kids, rekindle the romance with her husband, and decide to step down as president of the company to do charity work instead. She will not, however, step down as coordinator and host of the local book club because she refuses to lose control of the cheese and wine selection – everyone else has awful taste.
The Co-Dependent
The boyfriend hopper, the one whose “in a relationship” status never changes, but the “with _____” portion varies from week to week. She’ll graduate with her MRS degree, and become a full time stay-at-home mommy for a couple of years until she runs a family trip to Disneyworld where she runs into an old college flame whose engineering firm has been hired to design the park’s newest exhibit. She realizes that she may love him more than her husband, and once she is confident that he loves her too, a divorce ensues and she packs up the kiddies and moves to his Orlando apartment where the cycle begins yet again…
The Blame-Me-Not
He never turns in assignments by the due dates, but always has an elaborate excuse as to why it was as far from his fault as it gets. To the Blame-Me-Not, grades are negotiable and he deserves as good a grade as his fellow classmates because he claims to have invested just as much time into his work (but actually just invested his money in having someone do it for him). In ten years he will be struggling with his inability to have a successful relationship because he can’t seem to care about any woman more than he cares about his mother. As a matter of fact, he recently moved back into mom’s house after he was laid off from his fifth mediocre job since graduation. She cooks him his favorite breakfast, blueberry pancakes, every morning. They go great with self-pity.
The Alcoholic
We all know someone who goes out approximately 8/7 nights of the week, but somehow still manages to stay off academic probation by popping a couple Adderall pills and getting a solid 12 hours of cramming in the night before an exam. He walks into class with bedhead, stamps on his hands, and possibly smells of last night’s/this morning’s liquor. In ten years, he’ll be working as the owner of a couple local restaurants, happily married to a fellow college alcoholic and will have children who will never know their parents’ past partying ways. His family will be the most popular in their suburban neighborhood, known for their annual luau beach block party. He consumed enough alcohol and drugs in college to last a lifetime and now finds reminiscing about those times (what he actually remembers of them) satisfying enough.
The Non-Student
That friend who has so much free time you question their actual enrollment in college classes. The one whose stress level remains at zero even during finals week and who somehow manages to go out on the daily. The one who obviously got accepted because mommy and daddy “knew somebody.” In ten years, he’ll still be mooching off his parents’ connections, working at a successful marketing company, until his laziness sets in and he’s fired, only to have good old mom and pops pick him back up with another awesome connection and he scores an even better job. He marries a trophy wife, but refuses have any kids. He’s too cool for that. They both agree that her plastic surgery will be a better financial investment anyway.
The All-Knowing One
And I do mean “all-knowing” with enough sarcasm to be wrung-out…there’s at least one in every class, never fails. The girl who over-annunciates everything she says and cannot go 5 minutes without sharing something so intelligent that the rest of us mere mortals can’t even understand it. In ten years, she’ll be a professor at some big-name university whose ratemyprofessor.com score is practically negative due to her condescending mannerisms. She won’t have many friends, but that’s okay because she loves herself and her job enough to make up for it. She spends her weekends giving speeches at the university about how to be successful and the rest of her time at home with her four cats.
So there they are. The 100% certain, no-doubt futures for these stock characters you meet during college. In actuality, you meet so many people in such a short amount of time that it would be impossible to get to know everyone’s complexities. Nobody fits into these categories whole-heartedly (and of this I actually am 100% certain). They could be anywhere in ten years and so could you, but hey – if daydreaming about the futures of your classmates is the only way to get through that 2 hour history lecture, why not?