How Not to Experience Your First Year

By Audra Foster

If you are an upperclassman, then please, read this and reminisce fondly of your first year. But if you are a freshman, like myself, then please, WHINE WITH ME! Are you tired of having to sacrifice your evenings and weekends? Are you sick of wasting your time talking about time management when you could be actually working or—God forbid—having fun? I know I am!

The fact that we all made it into college, and through orientation, and well into the first month of school proves that we have some idea of how to handle college life. It’s not like we all had to struggle through four years (or more) of high school to get here. And it’s not like we’ve all been alive for at least seventeen years now. Chances are we’ve picked up at least one or two life skills to keep us from flunking out completely. So why are we forced to relearn the most basic of concepts? Has our public education system sunk so low that we cannot rely on it to teach us the bare necessities? Must we be retrained in every matter of existence?

You can’t honestly tell me you’ve completely redefined a lifetime of habits based on a few short and memorably awkward sessions with your poor, overtired RA, or a well-meaning employee of the college, or some overly enthusiastic and completely irritating individual that you can’t relate to no matter how hard you try. I think it’s highly unlikely that you’ll find anything significant in some of these first-year experiences, no matter how hard you try.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t try—by all means, try. Try and try again. Try to connect to people you don’t know, people who may or may not live down the hall and share the same bathroom with you, and still don’t talk to you.

Try to start a conversation with a bunch of know-it-all almost-nineteen-year-olds who think the entire thing is just bullshit, FYE Leaders. Go on. I’d love to be there if you succeed. Because I haven’t. And I haven’t met anyone who has. Each session contains the awkwardness of orientation coupled with the raw angst of being told what to do, which any self-respecting college student knows is horrendously and egregiously unfair.

Then why do we continue to go and suffer through insufferable lectures upon lectures? Because our housing is at stake! Or maybe some of us have enough respect for our RAs and RCs to attend with enthusiasm. Or maybe some of us genuinely like events such as this, and enjoy the chance to meet new people, discuss issues, ask questions. That’s the golden part of being a first-year—you can ask as many questions as you want, because, truthfully, we don’t know all the answers yet. We’re newcomers to this lifestyle and this campus. Maybe we need a little guidance.

Or maybe we need to grow up and figure it out on our own. Personally, that’s my philosophy. I’d rather stumble around on my own and make as many mistakes as I need to until I figure out where to go and what to do. And if the system is as infallible as they’re trying to convince me it is, then I shouldn’t be able to mess myself up too badly, right?

But I’ll go to the FYE sessions I have to go to, and I’ll smile nice so they will swipe my ID and I will have decent housing next year, and everything will be fine. Never mind what I could be missing out on. Never mind all the work I could be doing, or the friends I could be hanging out with. Never mind anything that is better than sitting there thinking “I could be doing something so much better right now.” I don’t know what I will think, looking back at the end of the year, but I know my real first year experience won’t involve ‘First Year Experiences.’