Your friends always seem to be making fun, impromptu plans and everyone is invited. But you won’t be there because you’ll be stuck on desk duty while everyone else is out having a good time.
This is usually the quality of your results.
You never catch a break! In Residence Life, we don’t find incidents. Incidents find us.
It was bad enough that you just stayed up until 4 a.m. handling an incident with campus police. Now you must write and submit a report about it, even though you can barely remember your own name at this hour.
This was supposed to be a fun night. And now I have to leave because we are now violating my contract policy.
…And everything to do with the chance of writing an incident report afterward.
Even when the semester starts, the training never ends.
College campuses have stairs literally everywhere. Even outside sidewalks have stairs! Going up each and every stair step can be exasperatingly tedious. In my personal opinion, the best way to conquer any step-laden campus is by taking them two at a time. I promise, it saves the patience you will need to last that three hour lab.
man making a coffee lattePhoto by Jennifer Bedoya on UnsplashLike one kid in my biology class said, “I went from never having a cup of coffee in my life to having one everyday.” No matter how you take your caffeine: Coffee, soda or an energy drink, when you've had one of those extremely late nights, caffeine is a must! It's the only way to make it to the next gap in your day when you can finally take a nap.
Photo by Unseen Studio on UnsplashI had to include this one because most college freshmen finally cultivate study skills during their first year in college. More or less, fortunately, I had developed some prior to arriving at college due to my insanely hard high school courses. But this is a truly important survival skill, which is first after scouting out free food.
This is a survival skill at the most basic level — never pass up the opportunity for free food. There is nothing like the instant regret minutes after passing up a meal for which you didn't have to fix or pay. A few good places to check are: Club meetings, those weird campus events named after obscure holidays and over-zealous outside organizations that are in desperate need of college student involvement.
Photo by Sinitta Leunen on UnsplashI should probably have more dignity than this, but college has taught me how to sleep literally anywhere. I mean, after all, why do you think the student centers and lounges sport comfy couches and lounge chairs? And even if they aren’t all that comfy, we'recollege students and can’t be too choosy. If your room is halfway across campus and you only have 30 minutes before your next class, curling up in that green lounge chair is just as good as crawling in your bed.
Photo by Kate Stone Matheson on UnsplashDo you remember that crazy period in your life when you coiled at the mention of taking a nap or going to bed. Your motto for life was, “Kinda work hard, and play really hard.” Well, you are about to regret every nap you ever gave up in your life. Your motto is about to become, “Work hard, play hard and cry over missed sleep.” Sleep is a precious commodity in college, but there just isn’t enough of it. Whoever learns to bottle up a nap and sell it will be rolling in the dough.
Procrastination is something you did in high school because you were too busy attending ten different clubs and creating a killer resume for college. At college, procrastination happens because looking at that chemistry homework is just too sad and painful. So instead we become masters at productive procrastination. Doing other, easier homework, taking an extra nap, running to the gym, checking the dining hall for more pizza and calculating your current grade in a class are perfect ways to distract your mind from the sad reality of school without feeling completely guilty.
This was not an exhaustive list at all, but just a small insight into the many skills for which my college tuition has already paid. Many thanks to my parents who allowed me to learn these valuable life lessons; college really was worth the tuition money.
College is some of the greatest years of anyone's life. Its a time to be outrageous, different and free; a time to do everything you were afraid to do. Here are 38 things you will learn during your four (maybe, five or six) years in college!
Because you will most likely be joined by five or six other people doing the same thing.
