SVHS grad reports on college life

The problem with expectations is that life often fails to meet them. And no, this is not a Murphy’s law sort of thing, since it often fails to meet the bad ones too.
For example, having been told I would freeze my butt off in upstate New York, I really didn’t expect to have two weeks of sunny days in mid-January (admittedly they were cold sunny days, but even temperatures in the 30s don’t negate the fact that the sky was blue.)
Of course, I also thought I wouldn’t be taking a math class, and look at me now.
College has been both exactly what I have expected it to be and exactly the opposite.
People used to like to tell me that I would adore college, utterly thriving in a world of academia, where people would not only understand the word academia, but live it every day. And, although I’m sure most of the people here know the word, this was certainly an expectation that have yet to be met. Not everyone who gets into college, even my college, is intelligent. Sometimes, they can even be stupid.
But then, I think I like this better than some mystical ivory tower; it’s nice to be able to know that I’m not going to be ostracized for mispronunciations.
So even though things might not be exactly as people told me they would be, I still thrive here. In all it was an excellent first semester, even if the food sometimes reached truly horrible levels of mediocrity.
I get along beautifully with my roommate, have a new circle of friends and did pretty well in my classes. And best yet, I fit in well here.
The admissions office likes to tell people about the diversity of our campus. What they don’t really explain in admissions packets is how little it really matters. No matter how different we are – ethnically, culturally, financially, nationally – we still have one truly important thing in common: our school and the fact that we are here to learn, we are ready to learn and we want to learn.
I was surprised how well I was prepared for college, academically speaking. AP English, for example, made two of my English classes a piece of cake. But despite that, nothing in high school prepared me for the flood of memorization that is Latin, and the amazing amount of reading professors expect their students to be able to cover in a short time. Our first week back this semester, I found myself expected to read about 300 pages.
There are other things that growing up in Sonoma didn’t prepare me for. For example: the sheer number of stairs here. I tried counting once and ended up losing track around noon with 280. That many stairs is nothing to joke about, especially in a winter coat.
Also, I never realized exactly how much sweeping my parents do at home until I had to do it for myself in my own dorm room.
Speaking of dorms, I think that my experience in my house (all dorms here are referred to as houses here) has been wonderful. Between dorm events and house fellows (professors who live in the dorm), it feels more like a family than I really expected a college residence to feel.
I could tell so many stories about being here. I could talk about playing Frisbee in the dark and in the snow; I could talk about the books that I’ve read, the tests I’ve taken, the food I’ve had to eat. I could tell you all about how that strange mix of nerves and joy that filled me throughout my first few weeks here and the lovely feeling of contentment that comes of finding an place in the world. I could also tell you about how homesick I get, those days when the only thing I want in the world is to get on a plane and go home.
Often in college, there’s a bittersweet aura around the very differences that I profess to enjoy. It’s easy to forget where I am, telling college in-jokes to high school friends and vice versa. And, since I’m so far away, I can’t make it home except for major holidays, which in turn makes it easy to fall into two completely separate lives. I have my California life and my New York one. I want to be able to reconcile them, combining my newfound ability to conjugate Latin verbs and make friends my own age with my old ability to write analytical essays in 40 minutes and keep friends for years. I’d like to be able to take the parts of each life that I like and become something more than two parts of a whole.
But I suppose I have at least three and a half more years to figure this out, so I’d better decide on my major first.