Most people before coming to college only got sick a few times a year and some people never even got sick. When you come to college, you are constantly around people in small confined areas that are not as clean as you may be used to. Most people will spend the first few months in college perpetually sick and spreading their germs to the people around them. If someone in your friend group is sick, you are almost always guaranteed to get the same illness.

As a freshman who got strep twice during the first semester of college, I can tell you being sick in college is a completely different experience.

1. You have to take care of yourself

Yes, when you are sick in college your friends will constantly ask you if you need help or if they can pick something up for you. However, in college, you feel bad asking people to do something for you because you recognize everyone is extremely busy. It is completely different when you are sick at home and you just lay in bed and ask your parents to do everything for you. In college, you actually have to get up and move around which only prolongs your sickness because you are constantly tired.

2. It’s harder to miss classes

If you attend a small college most professors take attendance and even at large schools, professors often take attendance to hold students accountable. When you are sick in high school, teachers generally assume your parents know and that you are actually sick. In college, however, students are sick for many reasons ranging from being tired to being hungover. If you miss class in college, professors often prefer you don’t email them because they get so many emails about people being ‘sick’. So for the people who are actually sick, you have to go to class because nobody wants to be labeled a lazy student.

3. You keep getting worse

In college, you are constantly around the same people which means you are always around new colds, viruses, and bacteria. You also are generally more tired in college because you have a lot going on all the time. This all makes it harder to get better because you have no time to recover before you are sick again. During the first few months in college, I went through more medicine than I usually did in two years at home.

4. You can’t go to your doctor

When you are sick at home, you can just make an appointment and go to your doctor. Your doctor generally knows how to treat you and is able to give you the right medicine. In college, it is difficult to make an appointment with a primary care physician so most of the time people end up going to student health care services or the minute clinic. Most of the time you can’t make an appointment with a doctor and end up seeing someone who has such a large amount of patients, it is virtually impossible for them to spend time with you. In my experience and many of my friend's experiences, we end up receiving the wrong medicine or antibiotic so we just end up staying sick.

5. Sometimes you bring your sickness home

Since you can’t control when you are sick, you often end up getting sick around the time you are going home for break. Although it is better to be sick when you are home, no one wants to spend their short break stuck in their room trying to recover. Between final exams, packing to leave and actually flying home, you end up getting sicker. So when you get home you have no time to go to dinners with your parents or see your home friends that you haven’t seen in months.

Overall college is a great time and it is even better if you can manage to not get sick.