This is honestly painful to admit, considering I dreaded school as a kid. Faking a stomach ache, talking in a hoarse voice, the hot water bottle trick, everything. I was the kindergartner screaming as the teacher aids pulled me from my mom at the beginning of the day. I would cry every night, because I hated the idea of going to school. Despite my hatred for going to school, I loved being a student. High school was when I really began to enjoy going to school and seeing my friends. I loved the community. I went to every single dance and several of the football games. Sports, fine arts, service projects: I was all over it, and more of the same came in college.
In college, school became my life. It's where I live, eat, study, see my friends, have adventures and work. As much as I love the smell of chocolate cookies wafting across the campus from the Malt-O-Meal factory in town, I do take it for granted a lot. The nights of sitting at my desk, high-lighting the next day's reading, until 3 a.m. do that to me. Here are just a few of the difficulties during the summer that leave me missing my "intensely residential," liberal arts college.
1. The black hole of Netflix
When I imagined college as a high-schooler, I figured it would be more of the same. Binge-watching Netflix after class and going out on the weekends. To my surprise, I hardly touched my Netflix account my entire freshman year. There was always something more interesting I could be doing, as well as way more productive. Try watching an entire season of "Friends" when you have 73 pages of Dante's "Inferno" due in the morning. (I didn't always leave things to the last minute...maybe). Now that I am home for the summer, when I get home from work, Netflix swallows the rest of my night. Literally nothing happens, except for "Law & Order: SVU", "Friends", or "Orange Is the New Black". It is literally a black hole. My sense of time goes out the window, whereas at school I had nearly no time for anything other than homework, but I knew how to make time and budget it better. The only time I'd watch Netflix at school was when I went to the gym and did a cycle on the elliptical.
2. Work Work Work Work Work
Even if you live at home for the summer, most college students find themselves either in awesome paid internships or whatever part-time gigs they can get their hands on. For me, and a lot of others, it is the latter. As a workaholic, I have replaced my school schedule with an equally strenuous three-job work routine. Two of my three jobs require standing or walking all day. Being a cashier and a waitress, my legs are ready to fall off at the end of the day. Sure, most of us do a lot more walking at school, but there's something about standing for eight hours straight that leaves me completely tapped out at the end of the day. I remember waitressing a wedding last summer, and afterward one of the other waitresses and I were scraping half-eaten tilapia into the garbage can from dirty plates. I remember looking at her, with stains from salad dressing and gravy all over my shirt, and saying, "I cannot wait to go back to school. I would rather do a research paper than this, even though I get paid for this."
3. It's Not All About You
One of the nice things about being at school is having the freedom to take care of myself, and only myself, most of the time. All I have to do is get myself to class on time, go to work, go to meals and stay involved...and sleep maybe. Studying and homework is all that I really need to worry about. At home, this is not the case. Even though I live with a roommate who is like a sister to me, we operate in a judgement free relationship. Family is wonderful, but it's not like that. I get into a lot more conflicts at home than at school because I get annoyed with my family and they definitely get annoyed with me too. I have to share my car so that the four of us can all get to our jobs on time. Being home requires a lot more collaboration and compromise, and a lot less independence, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy it. There's nothing like your first dinner home after getting back for the summer, especially when your parents know how to cook.
4. Express Yourself, But Not Too Much
When you come back to a fairly conservative and very Catholic family after spending eight months at an extremely liberal, liberal arts college, your family is just as alarmed as you are. Having long discussions about anything and everything in a friend's dorm room until late at night has become a norm. It's a fact of life. Oh it's Wednesday, I guess we'll go to Anna's room and vent about our own personal existential crises. At home, this is not the case. Chances are your parents won't find your feminist fury quite as amusing. Most of the time they won't take it seriously. I know in my first weeks of being home for the summer, I was annoyed every single day about some issue that my parents didn't agree with me on. And it's not just them, even friends from high school and extended family look at me in amazement when I want to discuss issues like abortion, the stigmatization of mental health, hatred toward LGBTQ communities and xenophobia. We shouldn't talk about those things, right? It's not like college where we are being taught to discuss these things, and constantly encountering communities where these problems are always on the table for discussion.
5. Loneliness
This one usually hits when you are a month into your summer, at least that's what's happening to me. A month is right around the time we get settled into the routines of our jobs or internships, and have tapped out everything we needed to catch up on on Netflix. Things start stagnating and we miss the people we've spent the last eight months with. I've even been feeling the nostalgia for high school days. I've stayed in touch with a lot of friends over social media, but it seems like I never have the availability to get together with them and catch up because of work.
Don't misunderstand me: I love being home with my family, and I do appreciate the entertainment I receive via Netflix, but Summer has always stressed me out more than the average person. Being someone with a Type A personality, I can't handle not having a schedule. Personally, without having to fill out the blocks in my daily planner everyday, I can feel my brain turn to mush.
