Everyone says these will be the best four years of your life, but they must be forgetting about all the things that college students have to do and go through in order to survive. Here are a few reminders of things we constantly have to worry about and do just to get by.
1. Maintaining Your GPA
The stress of maintaining your GPA is enough to keep you in on the weekends, to keep you from eating dinner, and to basically ruin your life. You'll spend 2 hours on a 5 question quiz to make sure you get them all right. You'll revise your paper so many times that it actually starts getting worse. You'll do just about anything it takes to not let your GPA slip because our professors and advisors tell you that you won't get a job without a good grade point average. But sometimes, we crumble under the pressure or we meet that point in the semester where it's hard for you to care.
2. Living In The Dorms
The annoyance of constantly being surrounded by tons of people you do and don't know is difficult to get used to. The constant sounds of the doors opening and closing, the vending machines beeping, people running down the hall, the toilets flushing, the loud music, tv sounds and random noises you can't really explain? Yeah that all get olds really quickly. But on the bright side, we all have incredibly spacious rooms to hang out in, right? The bottom line is that dorm life sucks, but it can, however, be seriously entertaining.
3. Keeping Up With Your Social Life
This is the most difficult of all. Your friends all think you hate them because you're never around. But why? Mostly because you're too busy keeping up with the other nine stressors.
4. Pulling All Nighters
I told myself I would never procrastinate bad enough to have to pull an all-nighter. Now it's a miracle if I get four or more hours of sleep in a night. It has actually become part of my routine. The worst part? I hate coffee.
5. Eating Like Crap
This is so self-explanatory. But really, college should have more to offer than chicken tenders, pizza, pasta and cheesecake because those are all very delicious and very fattening.
6. Walking Everywhere
Oh, you're hungry? Instead of just walking to your car and driving somewhere, you have to walk 10 minutes across campus to eat the crappy food mentioned above. Then you have to walk back and reflect on how poorly the food tasted. Not to mention you are forced to walk several miles a day in ALL weather conditions. Oh, there's a tornado? It doesn't matter because colleges don't cancel for anything. See you in class!
7. Not Knowing What You Don't Know
I catch myself saying and thinking this a lot, "I don't even know what I don't know". This phrase arises when you realize you have officially fallen far, far behind and will probably be unable to catch back up with the rest of the class, especially because you don't even know what questions to ask.
8. Trying To Graduate In 4 Years
This is near impossible. Trying to graduate on time feels exactly like cramming six hours of studying into a quick five-minute session right before taking the test. It's stressful. You then realize that wishful thinking, hoping and praying can only do so much.
9. Skipping Class For Another Class
It's Tuesday night and you've already written a five-page paper, completed two assignments, studied for a quiz and began your project. But it's getting late and you have to get some sleep before you fall asleep on your laptop and wake up with a burn on your face. You decide that you'll get up early to finish your project. You set your alarms and set everything up for morning project. But you were really tired, slept through your alarms, and barely woke up in time for your first class. This project is worth 10% of your grade so you have to finish it and it has to be perfect but you don't have a break today. So, in order to finish it, you skip your morning class to work on the project, which is for another class. I won't say how many times I've done this but it's more than I'd like to admit.
10. Not Having Time For ANYTHING
College consists of going to class, going to work, going to meetings, going to appointments, meeting with your professors, meeting with classmates for group projects, having internships, having good grades and somehow having fun on top of it all. The chances of me actually having enough time to shower, eat, and sleep every day are slim to none. But somehow, we make it all work.
