Being a freshman certainly happened. I was blessed to avoid the culture shock that some experience when coming to college, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t face my share of hurdles. These hurdles helped me to learn some harsh truths about adult life that no class can cover, so I’d like to share a few.
The wind blows many ways, and quickly.
Life before college was pretty streamlined for me, as I imagine is the case for most young Americans going through the education system. There’s a certain element of predictability to pre-college life. The career trajectory is a straight line until you get to your first major decision: what college you choose to attend. Immediately after starting to attend college, that all changed for me. I went from being able to plan weeks in advance with confidence in my predictions of future events to not being sure what the next hour is going to look like. The wind of life blows hard and fast, always changing directions. Each little decision could change everything, or nothing at all. Adult life is extremely unpredictable, which makes it both exciting and predictable.
Everything is personal.
Something my teachers used to tell me in high school is that some things in life are just not personal. In the cutthroat world of academia, trying to consider the human factor is a burden. This was, in retrospect, a complete lie. Humans are such emotional creatures. It is in our nature to care about the things around us as a motivator to engage with them. This includes the choices we make for the sake of career progression. It became apparent that making decisions that affect others isn’t something to be taken lightly; once slighted, people will go to maddening lengths to get even, so doing things to benefit yourself at the cost of others is a risky bet. People are going to take what you do personally no matter how much you try to reassure them, and one day, it will come back to bite you in the ass.
The world is a small place.
Disney was right: it’s a small world after all. I was often surprised with how densely interconnected life is on campus. Making the first step out into the wild world was enough to get the ball rolling. I went from knowing nobody one day, to over a dozen people by face and name a week later. What’s most incredible to me is that organizations with seemingly no relation have subtle connections that tie them together. Such a tight web of ideas creates a small world where everyone has an opinion on something and people know a lot more than they’re letting on. Making connections was something I knew I would need to do in adult life, but I did not expect to form so many by accident just by being in the right place at the right time.
These three things are just a few examples of the many, many lessons I wasn’t expecting to learn as a freshman. Life is so much more complicated than words can describe, and nothing could have ever prepared me for how much there is to see and do in the world outside my home city.
