In the aftermath of Halloween, fear is a topic on everyone’s mind. There is one unavoidable fear that every college student has in common—the fear of growing up.
College does an amazing job of easing you into “real adult life.” You gradually take on more and more responsibilities along with your understanding peers. Feeding yourself (and not just junk food from the dining hall), getting your homework done, and the dreaded laundry all rely on your growing self-discipline.
But then you are kicked out of the comfy, cozy dorms and into the harsh reality of apartment living. Sure, you might have more closet space and somewhere new to hang besides your floor mate’s room. However, the more space you acquire, the more you should be able to take care of yourself. Homework is balanced with club meetings and running to the next review session. You have to know how to clean out the drain and how to reset the cable when it goes out on the television—or worse yet, how to plunge the toilet.
Then comes the actual horror of cooking for yourself. Unless you are culinary inclined, this is potentially the worst part of being an adult. There will inevitably be a time when you accidentally poison yourself from the freezer burned, back-of-the-fridge concoction that you’ve made yourself. But even if you are a Brown Street pro, there will be the unavoidable time where you’ll have to drag out the can of soup your mom bought you months ago and try not to set off the fire alarm.
As you scramble for housing points, you also move up the housing ladder and finally get that front porch you’ve been waiting for since freshman year. However, with that coveted overhang comes the even more responsibility. Oh, the party you threw last night was a blast, but all of those beer cans on your front lawn aren’t going to pick themselves up. Because as poor college kids, there’s no extra money for fines.
Let’s not forget our brave peers living in landlord houses. Paying rent, electric, and cable along with buying your own food makes you the closest to actual adulthood. It is hard for your university-housed friends to comprehend the stress of balancing a school with a job. Because it’s not just extra beer money when you go to work, it’s the literal roof over your head!
Yet we all make it to graduation somehow. No matter how much we dig our heels in against it, adulthood comes for us all. Then comes the real struggle of finding an “adult job.” We have to show our parents that the last four years were more than just parties and that we won’t be living in the hastily finished basement forever. We will be able to strike out on our own. We’ll get a cheap apartment in a part of town that makes you worry and learn to budget each paycheck after some weeks where we only eat ramen—taking us back to the days when ramen was the only thing we knew how to cook. We’ll pair off and settle down. And the fear that once lurked in the back of our mind will become a memory of youth that we’ll laugh at in our own kids.
