College Life: 12 Things That Change When You Go To College

Stock up on sticky notes or start training yourself to set reminders in your phone. Some students take to carrying around a piece of paper or legal pad with a list of things they need to do, while others carry around a planner, and most supplement their written notes with electronic reminders. You will forget about assignments, extra credit, group meetings, emailing your advisor, and even meeting your friends for lunch. Your mom was there before to ask you about a paper for english, or tell you to go to your orthodontics appointment after school. She won’t be waiting in your dorm room when you get out of class or home from a party at two in the morning, you will be so excited with your freedom that you won’t even talk to her about all the things you have to do, she won’t know half of what you are doing and won’t even be able to remind you when you are the phone with her.

They will call off class fifteen minutes before it starts, they will forget you talked to them a week ago, they will decide not to teach a chapter in the book, and they will chew you out in front of a huge class for texting. Professors who have tenure, which basically means they will never get fired, especially don’t care. It is hilarious to watch a professor flip out on a student who is a know it all or who is constantly on their phone, but you do not want to be that person.

You laugh now and think, “I never studied for a single test in high school.” Jokes on you if you think college will be the same. That first C will send you into a pile of notecards, test reviews, and notes for every test thereafter. Study for your tests, you will thank Girlterest later I promise. Regularly check your grades on the colleges student website too, most professors are great about keeping your grades posted, or at least their grad assistants are great about it.

Even if you set the reminders in your phone, you will keep putting it off. It won’t matter that you were so on top of your homework game in high school, you will put things off until the very last minute, maybe not all of the time, but it will happen. But the glory that follows getting an exceptional grade on something you did the night before it was due will leave you feeling like you can do anything.

Because you procrastinate so much of course. Naps are a very very relevant thing now that takes up a good portion of the free time. Even if you have a job on your freshman year of college you will still find it surprising just how much free time you have. Your parents and high school teachers try to scare you by saying you will be so busy in college and the professors are so mean. They were kind of wrong, you will realize that it isn’t as hard as they made it out to be, but you still have to pay attention and get your stuff done.

If you are one of the fortunate students to attend a college where they provide you with a mini fridge and microwave in the dorm, you will begin to realize very soon that you can make just about anything in a microwave. Some dorms are even going as far as to put a kitchen on each floor of the new dorms, but some nights you will be entirely to lazy to walk down the hall to make yourself a grill cheese and you will resort to cooking something in the microwave. (P.S. you can cook a cinnamon roll in a microwave… you know the kind that come out of a can… it is amazing.)

For some reason college students have a tendency to set off about a hundred fire alarms a semester (I’ve been to two different colleges so you can trust me when I say it wasn’t just the college I went to). Someone will burn something in the previously stated gourmet kitchen that is called a microwave and the entire dorm will evacuate the building until the fire department arrives and gives it the all clear. There will be times when it’s raining, there will be girls wrapped in towels standing in the street, and you will be woken up in the wee hours in the morning. After your freshman year of college when you hear the fire alarm, you won’t run in complete fear and you will be royally ticked off for a reason you can’t decide.

It won’t really matter where you meet them, whether it be in the dorm or at a meeting of some sort, you will become friends with so many people. From hippie-ish art majors to the nerdy engineering and pre-med majors you will all have something in common and it’s called the-broke-happy-freshman-who-want-to-go-to-walmart-at-three-in-the-morning syndrome. There are so many happy people your age in college, well at least freshman year, that you won’t have a problem making friends and the type of friends you make will surprise you. The friends you make in college are the ones you will hang on to for years and years to come.

Yeah… um, some people “do the dirty” in the library, but that isn’t what I’m talking about. There will be thousands upon thousands of books and other things in the library on campus, but you won’t crack one open until a crazy professor makes you use an actual book as a source in a paper (typically this happens senior year). The library will be the place you go to print off stuff and that will likely be it’s only purpose until you get a bad grade and decide to start studying. The libraries on college campuses are SO huge and have so many nooks, desks, tables, and comfy chairs in them for you to sit down with a textbook or set to work making flash cards. Libraries are a great, great place to relax and get some alone time as well, the sooner you get familiar with your library the better.

The whole darks and lights things won’t matter anymore… you will just throw everything in the washer and hope for the best. If you have washers and dryers in your dorm or if you have to go to the mat you will be scrapping for quarters and determined to get everything washed in one sitting. Be prepared to spend entirely too much money on the dryer too, the mats think its funny to charge a dollar to wash and three dollars to dry your clothes. Once you wash them you have to dry them because you cant just take home piles of sopping wet clothes. The mats are a dirty, dirty scam.

Oh the glorious parking space. A truly rare find on college campuses. On the rare occasion that you find a spot directly beside your dorm you will vow to bum rides off your friends so you never loose that spot. But, there will come a day when your friends say no more and you have to loose that oh so glorious parking spot. Not to worry though, you will be so used to walking crazy distances all over campus that walking half a mile to your car won’t be a big deal. Learn to cherish those close parking spots though.

You will learn that you are more independent, capable, confident, and awesome than you could ever begin to imagine. You will realize that all those friends you made are drawn to you because your a great person. College is about finding out who you are and who you want to be, and there are so many people that cross your path in those great four years that will help you form a new you. College is about finding freedom, but that freedom has more people in it than you might think.