Postby Gravity Defier » Sun Feb 07, 2010 6:05 pm
Looking through here, it hits me that I'm still one of a handful of people I know (here and meatspace) who had an experience of college being High School Redux. That is to say, it was unpleasant. I'm not sure if that makes my view more or less valuable, or value neutral.
It boggles my mind, seeing/hearing about the hoops and the personal struggle people have gone/do go through in their pre-college experiences.
My parents didn't go to college (my mom didn't even finish high school in the traditional sense) and neither did my two older brothers. At some point in my own K-12 experience, I was told I was smart, gifted even, and that I was going to college. I have to wonder, sometimes, if I would have gone at all if it weren't for my need to do as I was told by my parents and other authoritarian figures (teachers, counselors).
We were always pushed to gather information (graded on it, I think) on different colleges and write papers on occupations we wanted as adults, so I ended up with a large amount of literature from colleges/universities across the country but I didn't pay them much attention. As for the aspirations helping to narrow down my choices...it really was quite laughable. I wanted to be an architect, a teacher, a musician, an author, a marine biologist, an artist. I lacked the confidence to think I could actually be any of them and so I couldn't decide on one to pursue. Repeatedly being told and reassured I was smart served the purpose of confusing me and making me doubt even more; "What are these people seeing in me?" is a question I constantly asked myself. I am a good student but they're confusing that with intelligence.
By that I mean I am very good at mimicking or absorbing information and spitting it back out. As soon as you ask for original thought, however, I tend to start folding. Especially in Literature/History based classes. I lacked the ability to put what I learned in any sort of real world context and often felt overwhelmed at what it seemed to take to get the big picture. I never noticed my peers having this problem, so although I graduated in the top 20 of 500+, I'm not and wasn't altogether sure I came out of HS with a better education than those lower than I was. To jump ahead for just a moment, this feeling of being woefully unprepared and lacking in knowledge was greatly magnified when sitting in a college classroom with these other kids who seemed to have their act together.
As I often do when overwhelmed, I acted out of blindness. My attitude was "If I don't know that I'm cut out for college and don't know what I want or am capable of being, I can at least not make the mistake of wasting a lot of money trying to figure it out." I took my full ride to the in-state school because it seemed like the smartest thing I could do monetarily and hey, my favorite teacher went there so it couldn't be too bad. The unfortunate part of that was, most everyone I considered a friend or acquaintance in HS also took the easy/cheap way out and went to that same school.
To make matters even worse, I decided to request being put in the same dorm room as one of my closer friends. Sure, it helped with my paranoia of leaving my things in a shared space (and in my head, vulnerable to loss through carelessness or theft) and it was a comfort to not feel all alone. But it also robbed me of the experience of knowing no one and thus being forced to get out and meet people. That is one of my biggest regrets.
I did eventually join an organization (ROTC) and let me tell you, they were about as different from me as you could get. Naturally athletic, where I had to work very hard at it to be at their level on one of their bad days. Very conservative, whereas I was a bleeding heart, tree hugging, communist liberal. And they had a confidence I was barely beginning to acquire, through a slow and painful process of making a lot of mistakes most kids go through in high school. The positive (that later became a negative) was that we were somehow able to be friends of a nature. My whole social life was hiking, movies, parties, dinners, workouts, trips with these people. When I was basically told I wasn't going to be given the opportunity to continue in ROTC because of an old headache issue, my social circle took it as a weakness on my behalf and effectively forgot I existed.
As far as getting to know classmates, I felt like a leper, much like I did in high school. I don't know if I naturally have a "f*** off!" face as my default, if it was my sitting in the front of the room for all my classes, or something else but it seemed to me that even in my major, everyone had formed their circle of friends and I wasn't making my way in. Part of me wondered if it was my lack of desire to drink. I got drunk once, with my ROTC buddies, but refused to do it again after that one time. I even tried joining a club but it turned into another situation where I showed up to get things done and no one wanted to get any closer, socially, than was required to get my help.
My dorm experience was god awful. Getting past the roommate situation, my floormates hated me. When I was in ROTC, I was getting up at 4, 5AM at the latest some days and even though I lived in the corner unit, at the end of the hallway, they often parked themselves close enough in the hallway that when they stayed up all hours making a lot of noise, I was losing sleep. I tried approaching as kindly as I could, asking them to move it to a common room or downstairs but they didn't give a s*** and continued. I took it to the RA, who did nothing but ask them to move. After that, I started receiving calls from a few, in which they would tell me, "You know you're a bitch, right?" There were also small confrontations in the bathroom, to the point where I had to threaten the RA, the HA, and the entire housing organization on campus with pressing charges for harassment if they didn't get these girls under control. That threat seemed to work but it made the girls who weren't involved equally likely to stay away.
I had one semester that I really fucked up, academically, due to depression but other than that, the classes were the only thing keeping me sane in college. I tried to keep the classes as early as I could -8, 9AM- because my attention seriously cut out after 4PM, as in, the latest class I could take with the hopes of paying attention had to start at 3PM if it was an hour long, 2PM if longer.
The work itself was tedious but not necessarily hard. Read, read, read, write lots of papers. Such is the life of a social science major/minor.
I also got a lot of flack from my dad about my major (Geography) and how I was planning to use it after graduation. I wasn't planning on it, actually. I just liked what I was learning. Politics, economics, history, sociology...it was all rolled into one. It went very well with my inability to find something I thought I could master. Various other people have also questioned my choice in majors but I can only tell them it was what made sense at the time.
Strangely enough, the thing I loved most about my college experience was learning how much I loved walking.
Otherwise, I didn't make any lifelong friends, I didn't have any standout moments or experiences I'll fondly look back on when I'm older.
Sorry this was so long.
Se paciente y duro; algún día este dolor te será útil.
)
