Turning Point: A Personal Anecdote About College
It’s surreal, the thought that I’m graduating college within this next year, more than likely this spring and then there goes four years of my life.
It was like one of those long-term relationships most people have when they’re young, you know the ones when their head is in cloud 9 and you never want that moment to end.
College is like that.
You still want to be 18, experiencing everything for the first time and never feeling like college is never going to end and you will always stay close to everybody you meet.
But what I love about college now is that things never stay the same, every year of college represents a cycle of constant change.
College is the moment in your life where you get to pick and choose the person you want to be, hopefully giving you a level of clarity and greater understanding of the world by the time you graduate college.
It’s also the moment where you break free from the confines of high school, letting you finally realize how big the world is beyond an 8am - 3pm schedule.
So when you start college, it is unironically a huge wake-up call.
I remember watching it and attempting to make it into existence: a college flashback scene from ‘How I Met Your Mother’ where Marshall opens the door to his dorm and meets his future wife: Lily.
This was going to be me, because back in high school the girl I could see (fantasize) myself with now had a boyfriend and all the other girls I talked to in the past were not worth it.
So, yes. Among getting into good shape, making friends and getting my degree in college, I was going to meet my soulmate because that seemed like the best thing that could happen- getting my life started young.
So, yes. There were a few times during the beginning of college where I for one reason or another, that I was meant to be with one girl or another.
That dating life I never really got to enjoy back in high school became my priority my freshman year of college but I approached it the wrong way.
I wasn’t one of those students who almost failed out of their first semester of college but I was one of those students who messed up in classes that I should have and needed to do well in.
To my luck, getting a few lectures from my parents really pushed me to soar academically and in all other parts of my life.
Describing freshman year, especially if you were living in the dorms and enjoying all the extra perks of college, is more or less an escape from reality.
Yes, you’re going to college to learn the means of hopefully contributing to the world one day, but with it comes the safety net the real world does not give you.
The progression of college comes with a greater understanding of how the real world works and finally coming to terms with the idea that no, you do not actually know everything.
This is associated with taking classes, meeting people and taking up opportunities that challenge everything you know for better or worse.
This is what happened for me as time progressed and my freshman year was in the rear window: the realization that nothing lasts forever.
Who could have thought that right? The idea of not having a 5-day meal plan at the dining commons or having the same roommates I had or not talking to that one girl I was madly into sounded insane.
So logically, you can either embrace change or choose to live in the past, I did a little bit of both but thankfully leaned more towards the former.
It wasn’t easy and there were times in my past where I wondered if maybe I was actually doing things right my freshman year.
Of course now I see the old pictures on my iPhone 8 Plus (can’t say I had one of those as a freshman) and I see a different person.
Insecurity never really goes away, sometimes it takes a backseat and be put under control and other times it reaches a boiling point.
When I saw those old pictures, even when I see them now, I see an insecure 18-year old who still had a lot to learn (we’re always learning but some of us learn slower than others) and was prone to making mistakes and having to fix them.
I went into college, not really ready to cut out everyone that I went to high school with but ready to put most of those old memories in the backseat.
After all, I worked hard in high school to get my grades to a good place after struggling so hard to get my GPA right.
For all those times I felt like I was working hard to get into college, it wasn’t until I started college that I found myself being determined.
Most of it stemmed from the financial sacrifice that parents were making to put me through school, taking away any obstacles that could possibly affect my grades.
But if college is about one thing, it’s about testing your limits and you need to mess up a few times to know what your limits are.
Thankfully my time in college hasn’t been defined by my mess-ups, more so by the life lessons and people I encountered along the way.
It was the moments where I could look back and see how much I learned, how all the experiences I had that were both good and bad, made me want to be a better person and less prone to misinterpretation of the world around me.
Those lessons were like fighting a boss battle in a video game, every victory gets you closer to an end point, with each level making you a better and improved version of yourself.
It’s impossible to chart the one moment in college where I felt that I grew the most because I see college as a major part of my life to help figure out who I was, almost making me a completely different person but still the same person at my core.
College was a continuation of high school; that’s how I thought of it whenever I thought of what being in a four year university was going to be like during my senior year of high school.
It was going to be a fresh start, a time for me to go into something with a clean slate but still have those connections from high school that made me who I was.
I would be going into college, maybe dating a girl I went to highschool with and keeping in touch with all of my buddies from high school, because they were my best friends in the world and nothing could get better than that.
Of course now I laugh at those people who think like that. Not the couples who stayed together from high school (love is love, if it’s true it finds a way, etc).
No, I’m talking about those people who glamorize high school, always reuniting with those people from their hometown and acting like grade school never ended.
My time in college wasn’t a story about me continuing from where I left off in high school, it was a story about me growing up.
I would never look down on those people who chose to stay in the small town from where I came from, they’re happy and that’s what matters.
I just wanted something different for myself. I was only close to a handful of people from my hometown when I lived there so for the most part, there was nothing keeping me in that town.
What was that town? Gilroy, California, thirty miles south of San Jose State- our claim to fame coming from having a festival dedicated to garlic every year and having a nice outdoor shopping center right next to an In-N-Out.
San Jose State is like it’s own little town, it’s 4-6 years of being around people you come to know and having once in a lifetime experiences, at least that’s what it is if you want it to be.
The cliche is true. College is what you want it to be, but it also leads you towards the things you didn’t know you needed.
College is the point in your life where your days of sitting through those long lectures and taking those stressful midterms only become part of the ride.
Gone are the days of those stereotypical high school cliques and feeling like an outsider, college is the epitome of the idea that you can be whoever you want to be in life
For me, I was going to be someone who didn’t struggle to talk to girls or socialize in general, didn’t have braces, ate healthier and occasionally worked out.
Except that things are never that simple, you can never account for unexpected physical and mental health issues, struggling with classes you literally need to pass to stay at state and coming to terms with the fact that nothing lasts forever.
