5. College Life

One year of college gone by, and life feels almost exactly the same as it did before.

Many people talk about college as a "period of great growth" or a "chance to reinvent yourself" or something like that. And for some people—a lot of people—it really is. I could tell that some of my friends were really growing a lot in their first years in college, and I was truly happy for them. But not everyone goes through a huge transformation like that.

For me, it feels like there were only minimal changes between high school and college. I had fewer friends and much more free time. I continued my life almost exactly as I had before college, with a couple small differences, like playing Marble Blast less and piano more to occupy my time. Classes were mostly not too troublesome, occasionally really dumb though. The math and physics ones made me happiest.

By far the best part about college was at least having a couple friends. Without them it would have been so much harder to get through the year. We ate lots of meals together and had long conversations about lots of useless topics (which is not to say we didn't have any intelligent ones). We also gave each other emotional support, which was very much needed at times.

However, something that I couldn't really get away from was just how immature most of the people seemed to be, even on the honors' floor. It was discouraging to think that so many people were very self-absorbed and always so loud, not the type of people that I wanted to be around at all, let alone be friends with. I was lucky to get paired with a very kind and mature roommate who I quickly became very good friends with, but it took me quite a while to find other people who I felt comfortable around. Later in the year, a couple girls from my classes kept inviting me to parties, but since there would be drugs and alcohol there I had to decline, making sure they knew it was nothing against them. However, I still only have scarcely three people there who I would consider true friends, so that's definitely something to work on.

One very important skill I did learn from college was how to deal with loneliness. I was lonely a lot—my roommate being very social, rarely in the room, and me not being social at all, always in the room—so when I wasn't doing homework, I had to occupy my time with things other than wasting away at my desk. Before I started spending more time with people outside my room, talking with my roommate would be the only form of meaningful social interaction I had. When he wasn't there for long periods of time I would quickly get very sad, and that plus a particularly evil calculus assignment one night eventually drove me to tears.

After that, I went to the student counseling center once, but I knew the only way to fix the problem was just to spend more time with people. I didn't want to accept that I needed to do that, but I suppose that if college was a period of growth in any way, that's how I grew, if only a bit. Maybe next year will be better, what with living in a real house on campus with my roommate from this year and two of his friends.

At the moment, I'm just going to occupy myself with useful things this summer, namely learning LaTeX and taking a Linear Algebra course online, before I go back to school in August, hopefully for a more enjoyable year than the last one.