Things We Love to Hate About College

College is a world filled with pros and cons, ups and downs, love and hate. Nothing can beat the 3 day partying streaks from Thursday to Saturday (Sunday for the extra ambitious!), the plethora of campus cuties walking around on a daily basis and the late night “girl talks” fueled by Popcorn and Wheat Thins lasting long into the early morning hours. However, there are certainly a few aspects that don’t hit such a high note, forcing us to whine for hours to our girlfriends at Hoco, wimper to our loved ones via tear-filled phone call and form irrational tweets/ status updates unashamedly accepting pity in the form of “likes” and “retweets” from total strangers.
 
Despite the common stereotype that college kids spend their entire four years eating fro-yo in the dining hall and playing beer pong with our buddies, being a college kid just isn’t that easy anymore. The following are a few things I’ve either overheard others complaining about, or personally whined about myself. Because I’m not a fan of negativity though, I did my absolute best to find any silver lining I could and hopefully shine a light on the pure absurdity of some of the common college gripes.
 
Midterms
hate: I’m certainly not innocent of keeping my midterm complaints hush-hush. Professors are crazy to think that we can memorize 3 months worth of information in one short week! I’ll never be able to take back those sleepless nights I spent in the library ruining my eyesight reviewing 500 PowerPoint slides and developing carpal tunnel writing out hundreds of note cards I barely even had time to review!
love: Midterm week is a 100% acceptable excuse to slump around campus in over-sized sweaters, sweatpants and a pair of rolled down Ugg boots. The vending machines are stocked and no one will even look up from their MacBooks to see you toss back 3 bags of M&M’s and gain 5 lbs in one week through stress-induced snacking. You definitely don’t have 30 minutes to waste putting together a healthy dinner to fuel your all-night study sessions, so Dominoes it is!
 
Big Classes
hate: First day of lecture and you spent a few too many minutes making sure your eyeliner was perfect for your campus debut. Now you’re crammed in the back row and sitting in a strangers lap in order to see over the aqua net of hair in front of you. Forget about a partial credit on your exams, a class of 400 is sure to be strictly scantron and nothing like the exams you took in high school guaranteed to “prepare you for college”. You’re screwed.

(It’s just you and 100 of your closest friends…)

love: As the semester comes to a mid-point and the weather gets colder, you begin seeing the advantages of your giant class after all. You’re professor is sure not to notice your seat in the back row is empty, he’s not going to pass around an attendance sheet to all 400 of you, and if you missed anything important in lecture you can borrow notes from one of the 20 kids living in your dorm who are also taking that same class! Win!
 
Group Projects
hate: Why is it that I always end up in the “randomly” assigned group with the slacker kid who didn’t even bother buying a book for the class and the diva who is too busy highlighting all her notes in fluorescent pink sharpie to actually read what is on the paper. I’ve got no other choice than to stay up all night in the Dimond putting together presentation cue-cards for so my not so lovely group members don’t mess up my hard earned average. So annoying.
love: Let’s be real, most group projects are pretty much jokes anyways and you can always depend on someone to step in and at least tell a knock-knock joke while you stumble over words even your professor can’t pronounce. If this group project is getting you out of taking an exam or writing a ten page paper, you know you’re going to be sucking it up and making those cue-cards.
 
Walking Everywhere
hate: Regardless of how active you proclaim yourself to be, walking on foot everywhere gets old pretty fast. When the air starts getting cooler there’s nothing I want more than to blow my entire budget on a cute pink moped to effortlessly zip me all over campus! Even a marginal amount of precipitation is enough to keep me locked in my room all day because walking an entire half mile to the gym is miserable to begin with, but walking in the rain and absolute torture.
love: Think of all the glorious exercise you’re getting walking from your room to Breaking New Grounds to class and back! You trekked up the library hill twice today and walked all the way to Kendall hall for Psyc? Who needs a membership to Wildcat Fitness when you spend your days power walking all over Durham?
 
Hangovers
hate: It’s 1 pm, you just woke up and it feels like someone physically removed your brain, beat it with a meat tenderizer and put it back into your skull. You’re roommates are asking if you want any of the leftover American chop suey their mom sent over this morning and all you can think about is finding the nearest waste basket so you can up chuck last night’s DHOP pizza special. Vowing you’ll never drink again, you retreat to you bed until around 7pm when the sounds of Ke$ha summon you to the living room to do it all over agian! Hangovers are a never ending cycle in the college world and a sad truth that most of us are forced to deal with at least once a weekend.
love: Sure, hangovers are completely miserable and can have serious head pounding side effects that make us hate the entire world around us. But you’ve got to admit, if you’re suffering from one of these guys it’s almost certain that you had a good time last night. The stories you hear from your friends and the texts you can barely decode are as sure a sign of a epic night as your swollen brain cavity! They’ve never stopped us before and they won’t stop us now!

(Yeah, don’t let this be you!) 

Floormates
hate: Thin walls and a small amount square footage means that you’re going to get to know your floor mates even if you don’t want to. You’ll be woken up by their alarm clock, bothered by their poor choices in music and disgusted any and all activities that sound even somewhat close to what could be sex.
love: Floormates who don’t listen to crappy music, press snooze 15 times before waking up or keep you up all night jumping on the bed with their boyfriend will soon become your best friends. They’ll be an ear to listen when the boys next door are playing Call of Duty on full blast all night when you’re trying to sleep and a shoulder to cry on when you’re cat passes away and you find out because of your sister’s facebook status update. Some suck, but most floormates are pretty awesome.
 
Registration
hate: Waking up at 7 am for your sign up time, entering in the schedule you took 5 hours to plan and surprise! You’re not getting a single one of the classes you wanted! You scramble around for a half hour trying to pick classes that won’t alter your chances of graduating on time until you realize there is just no hope. Print out that add/drop sheet and hope for the best kids, registration almost never goes the way we want it to.
love: So, you didn’t get any of the classes required for your major and now you’re stuck taking all gen eds with a bunch of kids you’ve never even seen before, might as well make some friends! New classes with new faces means you’re going to have to make some connections before you’re stuck with the kids nobody wanted for their group project! (see above). Who doesn’t like more friends?!
 
Regardless of how much we hate some of the things that come along with being a college student, most of them aren’t as bad as we make them out to be. Since there’s no way around taking midterms and suffering through group projects, my best advice is to grin and bare it. You’re only here for four years (most of the time) so you might as well make the most of it while you can!