Facts of College
1. Food
Dedication: After helping several friends get through college, I remembered how hard it was for me starting out and they inspired me to write this so thank them.
When I started college I had no idea that my diet would become consistent of Ramen noodles, some unrecognizable cafeteria food, and on a good night pizza. Nor was I aware of the stress that I would endure and the changes that would occur in my life. To be honest I wasn't exactly sure what to do when I went to college. I mean sure, I knew that I should go to classes and get good grades, but that's the obvious part (to most students), but I didn't know about all the little things that were involved. When I entered college I wished that someone had written a college student's survival guide and that is why I am writing this one, to help all of those newly graduated seniors who feel that they know just about everything there is to know, but are pretty scared right now. And why are they scared because of a little place many people commonly refer to as college, but it's much more than that name would seem to imply. I hope this helps all of you a little, and makes you laugh when you read it again later on. (I ended in a preposition, never do that in a paper, it's rumored that professors spontaneously combust if they see something like that.)
So without further ado let us embark upon the journey....
Food: it's a basic need on Maslow's chart of hierarchy, and one that you won't be able to simply overlook. It is actually the thing that many clubs and organizations in college serve in order to get people to attend an activity. If free food is being given out you can almost count on students being on hand to accept it.
When you first arrive at college, the cafeteria food will most likely be bearable. Usually this is to impress the parents, who are shelling out the big bucks for you to attend this institution of higher learning. However the low to mid-quality of food quickly changes as time passes, and will soon become nearly unbearable. Where do you turn?
Stay calm, relax, and no you can't eat your roommate. Generally ordering out is quickly turned to, however if you can get your parents to provide you with a microwave and a refrigerator, you're in decent shape. Get food from a supermarket. You don't need gourmet, by this point you could be eating wood and saying this tastes good don't know why I didn't think of it before. Get some things you can cook quick, maybe pop-tarts, or those little pasta microwavable things, but a college student's favorite is usually Ramen Noodles. (I recommend the low-fat variety due to the fact that those little suckers normally pack a lot of fat and the low-fat ones taste the same.) At particularly low or poor points in you college career you may find yourself price shopping for Ramen Noodles trying to save that dime. Ordering out can be good but it gets expensive. If money is no object, go for it, indulge, but for those where money is a continuing meddling nuisance - try the noodles, try macaroni and cheese, try try try.
The Floor: the place where you now currently reside. Well not the actual floor, but the story of the building on which you live. It will either be co-ed, which can be fun, or unisex, an experience. Each floor should have a Resident Assistant, or an upperclassman there to look after things, and to make sure the rules are followed and that things run smoothly. Usually they're pretty cool guys/girls. Remember they are students like you but their answers are sometimes too much like a form letter due to the training the college has given them.
This place is like your home base try to make friends with the guys/girls on it. The college usually sets something up to try and do this, with varying degrees of success. I hear it works much better on girls floors. (I lived in a dorm with unisex floors.) Close friendships can be made here and usually no matter what, it's been my experience, that you will remember each other even if they move off. It's a small bond that forms. This brings me to my next subject.
Roommates: I've known people who have had varying degrees of success with their roommates. I had four and they were mostly all good. Three of them transferred or flunked out or what have you, never to return and one is still my friend and we hangout together. (I now have a single room however and am quite pleased with it. Your roommate is usually someone that you will form a bond with like no other person. And this I believe is due to the simple fact that you live with them and they know how you wake up, sleep, and groom. They will be taking phone messages for you, meeting your parents and any girlfriends/boyfriends you bring back. They are a close part of your life. They can also be the most frustrating and annoying person on the face of this earth at the very same time and for the very same reasons. They're always around so their little idiosynchracies have more time to grate on your nerves.
Remember, your closest friend will not necessarily make a good roommate in fact I've seen it destroy friendships. However it may work, but be careful. Regardless, your roommate can become the person that you share the most with. It is one of the most interesting bonds I've formed. Don't expect this to happen though because it could lead to disappointment in the end. You and your roommate may not workout and a room change may become necessary, which could mean leaving the floor that you've just come to love and moving all your belongings yet again. Don't despair, it will be OK, it's happened to a few of my friends, maybe the next one will be better.
I know that lst part may have sounded depressing, but this is supposed to prepare you so I figured I better give it to you straight.
Financial Assistance: these are the people that give you money to go to school, (unless your parents pay for the whole tuition. If that is the case then you are very fortunate. You can skip this section, unless you feel that you must savor every word in this manuscript because my writing is the most amazing and engaging that you've ever had the pleasure to read.) Actually this is the machine that gives you money. You may have more problems here than anywhere else. And you may ask why, after all this institution has been doing this for years and the financial aid department has been doing the same thing for a very long time. They should have it down to a science at this point right? I believe the answer to this is that the institution is simply too big, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and also that no one wants to take responsibility for screwing up.
Financial aid has several different departments usually. Mine was divided so that one section told you how much you owed, one section you paid money to, and one section took your forms and could answer some technical questions, and they all had long lines. Normally you had to go to at least two different departments, and wait in two different lines, to get anything accomplished. It was not fun. From my understanding most financial aid departments are set up in a similar way, which just shows they found something that didn't work and just kept using it. They take away not only from your leisure time but your studying time, and they add 300% to your stress levels, taking away from your sanity. How do they do this?
They'll change the amount of financial aid you're going to receive for the semester. They'll lose your forms. They'll misprocess them. They'll send you bills threatening to cancel your classes if you don't pay. And none of them will ever admit that it was their fault. It was the computer or the other institution or department, never them. They're infallible ask them they'll tell you. So what do you do?
You live with it. You try to see them in person right in the begining have them look over your forms and have them make sure everything is filled out correctly, make sure to set aside at least a day to do this. Get all of your forms in, and leave and try not to go back, but if they lose a piece of your financial aid package, you should do two things. First call mom and dad and tell them that they lost your money. Have mom and dad call, and you should go in person to financial aid, and try to find out what is going on, and be nice. That last part about being nice is hard because you're scared, but relax, and remember if anyone can fix it, it's that department and if they like you, they're much more apt to help. I mean they'll help anyway, but having friends there helps. If it gets to a point where you aren't getting anywhere then you can get upset. Oh one more thing, try to file all of your financial assistance stuff together in one folder. It can make things easier.
Majors and Advisors: The reason you came to this institution was to study a particular field. It was right? OK well guess what, you probably won't leave college studying what you entered studying, and there can be complications in this. Like many of the credits you took in one field may not transfer to your new field of study, making it very hard to graduate on time and if you're on financial assistance, it (the financial aid) may run out in four years. Often times it does. My recommendation is you should be sure that you know exactly what you intend to do for your career, and I mean sure. I mean so sure that if you couldn't major in that field you would slit your wrists or perform some other desperate action. If you're not that sure you might want to enter as an undeclared major for one year. This will give you a broad base of classes. With this base, no matter what you switch to, many of your requirements should be fulfilled, and it allows you to experience several different fields of study. If you plan to enter a specified field like music or medicine, you can enter in one field of the subject and switch to another field of the subject without too many complications. This seems to be true with biology too. Like a couple of my friends were pre-med and right at the end they switched, one went to animal behavior and it was not a problem. All of his credits transferred to this new field.
If you go to transfer to another institution, you may want to know that that new institution of higher learning may only accept a certain number of credits from your old college or university. However you may not know that that number is subject to their review. What I mean by this is that if you took a philosophy coarse at your old school and your new school's program also requires a philosophy coarse, they may look at your philosophy class and say no, theirs was different from ours and so you need to take ours. So while they say that they'll accept up to 60 credits from your old school, just remember that could quickly become 13 credits. (An interesting note is usually these courses aren't so different from one another, but they don't care.) It's something to look into before transferring.
You'll have an advisor when you enter college. He's there to help you. (Well, he's supposed to be there to help you.) He approves the courses you are going to take and is supposed to help you so that you have all the courses that you need to graduate, while still giving you the freedom to structure it in your own way. This doesn't always happen. One of my friends was a biomedical engineering major and he wanted to take choral and every semester he went through hell with his advisor who didn't want to let him take it. Be firm and make sure you take what you want, but also make sure that what you're taking doesn't take away from graduating. This meaning, make sure that you still have enough room in your schedule to take any required classes. Another important thing to remember is your advisor is not omniscient and he/she may make mistakes. You should try and know the classes that you have to take or the requirements for your major. This should either be listed somewhere or someone should know it. This someone is not always your advisor. Ask other students in you major. My advisor didn't include an English class in my schedule freshman year and I found out too late in the semester that I really needed it. You should also try to structure you schedule before you go into your advisor. Put lunch breaks into it and remember a couple of things:
First remember what type of person you are. Are you a morning person? Second remember no matter what time you schedule you first class, it's going to be too early because you were up all night studying.... Yeah ... right that's what you were doing. I liked to schedule my first class at around nine so that I could finish my classes relatively early in the day. And I tried to balance my days so that I didn't have days where I didn't do anything. I always tried to put one or two classes on each day of the week and always relatively early. By structuring my schedule this way I would wake up and then get all of my classes done for the day so that I could do work and whatever else for the rest of the day. (I also found that I napped a lot more in college due to the fact that I was up late usually doing ... yes work.) But this may not work for you. You have to decide for yourself what is best. I'll cover more of this in my time management section. (If I ever get up the strength to get that far.) One other important thing is SCHEDULE EARLY. This means go and register for classes as soon as possible. If you wait too long, all of the good sections will be filled up and so you may be stuck taking a 8AM class or a 7PM class, or worse yet the class may be filled and you can't take it at all.
Fraternities and sororities: The Greeks. You'll know many more Greek letters after your first year of college due mostly to all of the frat letters around campus. Each fraternity is usually known for something, and usually drinking falls in there someplace. In fact if you plan on joining a frat you better enjoy drinking. Drinking often times forms a part of their initiation or their activities. I think part of this is due to the fact that you couldn't possibly be having fun in these things unless you were drunk. (No offense to all of you Greeks out there.) Sororities are also interesting, but I'll have to cover them in their own little subdivision.
First off there are different kinds of Frats, there are honorary frats for all of those high academic types. Social frats, which are the ones that I'll discuss the most in this section and professional frats which are kind of a combination of the two. They are a group of students gathered together who all share a similar interest, like music. For the remainder of this section, unless I specify otherwise, I will be discussing social frats.
Social frats can be good but before you join one, as I said, be prepared to drink and be prepared not to hang out with any of your old friends. (This also happens with sororities.) Each frat should have at least one open party every semester to attract new pledges, usually out of the freshman class. Frats don't usually care about upper classmen because upper classmen rarely join frats. You either join early in your academic career or you don't but there are exceptions to this. The rest of their parties will usual only involve other Greeks - sororities and fraternities. All of the parties will involve drinking some of the worst beer imaginable, because it's cheap. Pledging will involve different levels of hazing in almost all of the frats and sororities. But officially, no hazing occurs, yeah right.
Each frat and sorority forms its own reputation in the school. Many of these reputations aren't good and there is often good reason for this. It's been my experience that girls like frat guys. In general a frat guy will get more girls than a non-frat guy. These girls are often times sorority girls but most girls like the frat guys. However girls should not necessarily trust frat guys. There are some bad frat guys out there to give the whole frat a bad name and they will do whatever it takes to get sex or whatever (generally always sex) out of girls. I've heard many frat guys use the saying put out or get out. In other words honey you're in my room give me sex or get out and find your way home. Girls be wary of this and consider yourself warned.
Sororities are usually a part of the frat’s parties and they perform in many of the same Greek rituals I have already mentioned. (Wow I guess they really didn’t need their own section. Hmmm.)
Friends: You will find that you will have many friends that you like in different ways, and that you trust to different levels. They will often times be the people that you will have hours of conversation with at 2 in the morning and they will be the ones that are there to help you get through college. They're the ones you go to the movies with, order pizza with and play games with. The friends that you make in college are often times the friends that you will keep for the rest of your life. However, people change so fast in college that sometimes you will find that you are friends with someone one semester and not the next semester. Sometimes you will run across those friendships that do indeed stand the test of time and these will be the people that you will miss the most when college is over. They will be there when you get your girlfriend/boyfriend and long after that significant other is gone. Sometimes that significant other will be one of these friends and I've seen it both fail and work out very well. It really depends on the people.
Boyfriends/girlfriends: They'll take away from your studying time. They'll often take time away from your friends and if you’re dating a girl, they can put great financial strain upon you. These significant others can also add to your levels of stress, especially when there is something wrong with the relationship. However when things go well with the relationship, they can be great stress relievers and wonderful to have around. However such instances of success don't always occur and I often times saw that it hurt the two people’s academic careers. Good luck. No one said love was going to be easy.
Credit Cards: Ok so you have no money, but wait this seems appealing, plastic money. They look so cool and mature. And with them you can buy all you want and not pay for it (at least not right now). At college there will be areas where salesmen set up camp. This is where most students get their first credit cards. They, the salesmen will have tables set up and wait for you to pass on your way to and from class. They make it look really appealing. They even give you free things just for filling out the application for the card. These free things include candy and pens and slinkies. :-) But c'mon, if it was really such a wonderful thing why would they have to give things away to get you to sign up for it? If they were giving away free sex, would they have to give away a slinky with that, hmmmm, but I digress. :-) There are important things to remember with credit cards: 1. If you get one for emergency use only, make sure you use it for emergencies only. 2. If you use it instead of cash, make sure you have enough cash to cover the card's bill. Credit cards are very dangerous, and you can really rack up serious debt for many years, and possibly generations to come. Be very careful and try not to get too many, lik more than two is generally too many.
But you want the free stuff that the nice people offerring the credit cards are giving away right, because after all it's often times food,and well ... It's FOOD. :-) Ok well, you can still get the food. Here's what you do, fill out the application, take the food. When you get the new card, call the credit card company, tell them you never ordered it and cut it up into little pieces. You got your food, you don't have the debt, and the nice credit card guy got paid just because you filled out the application.
Bills: Ahhh bills, yes those wonderful things. They are some of the most constant mail a student can get. Companies will always send them to you, and they'll always be there for you, even if you don't want them. :-) Here's my advice, lean in real close on this one, PAY THEM! Duh. :-) Seriously these can be important things and you might want to file bill statements you get into a handy filing device. I've found that generally hanging folders in a milk crate work quite well as a filing device. You can file your receipts, financial aid info and bills there. It can greatly simplify your life, because you won't be tearing your room apart at all hours of the night saying "what the hell did I do with that receipt?" Trust me, it's cheap and will save you a lot of hell.
Laundry: It wasn't until I had a roommate that didn't know how to do it that I realized a person can go through their whole lives without knowing this simple operation. I will tell you all this, if you don't do it, trust me, people will definitely notice, and you'll start getting looks from all those cute guys and girls because you SMELL. I mean man you REEK. Do your damn laundry, and no ladies don't do the guy's laundry for them. Stand there, watch them do it, tell them how to do it, but unless he's paying you to do it, don't touch it, guys same goes for you. (Gosh out of context that last sentence could be construed ... nevermind). Alright seperate colors from darks and go nutty, fill the washer and follow the directions on the back of the detergent. If you're in a rush you can wash all clothes with the Bright Colors setting or the Cold Water setting. Be careful because in college people will steal each others clothes, so you might want to bring a book with you and read while you wash and dry. Enjoy.
Text Books: These suckers are expensive. You will be spending several hundred dollars on books that you would never consider reading if you didn't have to. Remember to buy only the books that the professor says are needed. Try to buy them early so that you can get used texts. If you get to the bookstore and all the books for a class are new, you might want to just wait until the class starts to make sure which books you need, the professor will tell you. Because if you get the wrong book, you'll end up in a long line for returns, incidentally you'll need your RECEIPTS to return the books. I have made it through five classes without the book, but that was because the lectures were the things that were being tested on, and because I had no money to buy the books. I did fail a class because the professor found out I didn't have the book. But that grade was removed from my record. I don't recommend going through a class without the book, unless you're sure you don't need it. I would recommend keeping most or all of the books that have to do with your major. They can be very important later on in school and llife. (Amazing how those two things, life and school are considered so seperate.) Another important thing to perhaps keep in mind is keep your tests, they are imporatant reviewing tools for the final.
It Ain't All That?: Ok yes I know sex and drinking were just the biggest things in high school. I mean that was the subject to talk about. Guess what, you're in college and they still are big topics. And a lot more people are doing both. However, you're more mature now and it's different, I mean you were in high school then and young and foolish .... HELLO?? STUPID??? you still are. I know you're on your own and yes you are growing up faster now, but these are still fairly big things. I'm not saying don't have sex, I would never say that. :-) Feel free enjoy yourself, but understand that that young man or woman that you are giving yourself to might not be there the next year, month, week, or day. And use a condom, I mean c'mon how expensive are they? Trust me a baby is more expensive, and if you get AIDS or something like that, the party could be over real fast.
Drinking, just be smart, don't drive drunk and know your limits. Try not to drink alone, and drink with people that you know and trust. I saw some guy pass out while he was walking from a club with five people. None of them knew who he was or what to do with him. They might have left him. I don't know. Ok was that lecture enough for you? It was for me. :-)
Papers and Such: If you are typing a very imporatant paper, like a final or something like that, on a computer, save it often. Save it in multiple places. I usually save it in 3 places and keep a hard copy, only because I lost 2 final papers, even though I saved them in multiple places and the only thing that saved my but is I had printed out a draft and I could scan it back into the computer. Trust me save it and print it.