The College Experience, Sleep, and Other College Myths
My nugget of wisdom from the first two months of my college experience is this: the college experience isnât a universal phenomenon. Thatâs right, the image youâve been given of the trials and tribulations of college from movies, and books, and parents, and friends is actually almost entirely in the palm of your hands. Sure, some of the pitfalls of college are unavoidable, but, for the most part, the college experience really is less of a shared experience and more of a personal adventure.
For a while I was concerned that I wasnât going to get the âcollege experienceâ because I wasnât going to a ânormalâ college. I have since come to realize that these things donât exist. There is no one âcollege experienceâ to pursue, and there certainly isnât such thing as a ânormalâ college. Sure, people are more prone to come to class covered in paint and charcoal here than at most colleges, and there are undoubtedly more people who can adequately appreciate a good color theory powerpoint, but at the end of the day the quirks of SCAD are probably just as far fetched as an other college.
Another piece of advice I think the world needs to hear is to get the sleep that you and your body deserve. Bragging about how little sleep you got is much more exciting when you are seven and your parents let you stay up on New Years to watch the ball drop. When you are a grown adult person paying top dollar to go to school, bragging about getting very little sleep just makes you shrivel up into a rasin of sadness who people avoid for group projects.
It would be a disgusting cliche to say that college is what you make of it, so Iâm not going to go there. Instead, I believe that college is already pretty set in stone as far as what it is. I think that the important part of the   your college experience is not what you make of it, but how you react to it.
The fact of the matter is that high school didnât prepare you for college, and by no fault of their own. The transition is up to you. You have to rise up to the challenge, like David and Goliath or crazy training montages in movies. No image of my first two months in college is actually more accurate than a movie montage; it went by weirdly fast, spanned hardship and success, had a weird amount of studio lighting, and was way over the production budget.
My parting thoughts from this entry are simple and succinct. Find a college thatâs a weird as you are and let your weirdness and its weirdness conglomerate into an experience that is so weird and so breathtakingly individualized that it looks nothing like the college experience that Hollywood tries to show us. College is perhaps the most irrevocably weird thing on the planet, so let it be weird, soak in its weirdness like the big, weird sponge you are, and one day youâll be the one telling future generations about going out for burgers at midnight or writing blog posts about college when you should be doing your drawing homework. And if that isnât inspirational, I donât know what is.
