Starting Fresh with Disbelief: A Freshman’s Take on a Strange New World

Published November 13, 2007

By Alex Townsend

As many students may have noticed, the semester is coming to a close. This may seem like a fairly ho-hum event for the upperclassmen, but it’s also a cause for complete astonishment for many freshmen (oh sorry, “first-years”). The question running through our minds and livejournals is how the hell did this happen? How is that I got to that unbelievably distant age and maturity of being in college? Am I really not in high school anymore? Have I actually been attending classes where the teachers are called professors for months now?

Sure, all those questions seem like they have obvious
answers, but do we really want those answers? There’s something very tempting about maintaining a delusion that this whole “freshman year”/”fall semester” thing is just some big joke. We’re really still in high school, still living with our families and hanging out with the friends we grew up with. We aren’t really in college, that terrifying place where the students have to decide what they want to do with their lives and take care of themselves. We don’t actually have to start growing up.

Still, that pesky Time keeps moving forward and self-delusions are getting harder and harder to maintain. In a bizarre twist UVM has become the place we live and now home is a place to visit occasionally. We are being forced to acknowledge that our families can live without us and that life goes on. Somehow, even with the months of applications, planning, and packing we still feel like we’ve been very suddenly thrust into a world that is very foreign and mind-bogglingly lonely. Even worse, it feels like you’re the only one who feels that way.

There seems to be a general assumption though, a hope permeating through the air, that the fear and loneliness will pass. Eventually college has got to feel like a normal way of life. Look at the upperclassmen. They’re not flipping out that they’re a five-hour bus ride away from the parents who’d be happy to take care of them if they got sick. The biggest problem they have is the five essays that are due right before Thanksgiving. There’s got to be some magical transformation that happens when you get the word sophomore attached to your name. A metamorphosis that lets you look at the shocked, stumbling freshmen and just shake your head with a knowing smirk.

So we can cling to that hope, however legitimate it may be, but what do we do in the meantime? Right now college is still scary and even the least well-adjusted freshman knows that we have to keep fighting to adapt, either that or go home. Neither seems like a very happy option. The fact is that time moves forward and no matter what our choices are we can’t really pretend to be kids anymore. That leaves us with either facing the specter that is the bachelor’s degree or facing the real world without it. It doesn’t generally take much thinking to decide which choice is more terrifying.

Still though, does UVM have to be our foster-home of strangeness and uncertainty until we force ourselves to adjust to it? That’s not an easy question to answer. Truthfully, there are freshmen who won’t be here next year, or even next semester. This place can’t be for everyone. The only advice that anyone can seem to give to help us cope is to try and make friends, participate in our classes, and maybe join some clubs.

It would really be brilliant if these were actually insightful words of wisdom. “My God! You’re right! I should make friends if I’m feeling lonely! I’ve just been hiding in a cave all semester and biting everyone in my classes. This ‘friends’ thing is the best idea ever!” So no, it’s not that easy, but it really is the best we’ve got. Whether it was kicking and screaming or with a sigh of relief, we were thrown head-first into the lake called ‘Life.’ It may only be a roped off section with a lifeguard on duty, but we still have to learn to swim, to figure things out for ourselves and decide how we want our lives to work.

Maybe in the end what we need isn’t some miracle transformation or bit of advice, but rather a change in perspective. Yes, college means a lot of changes and adjustments and those can be frightening, but it also has a lot of opportunities. I’m not just talking about those distant, theoretical careers we might get into one day, or the ways our
minds might expand philosophically when we learn that time is just an illusion, or even being able to go out drinking without your parents finding out.

I mean that right now, this very minute even, you have an opportunity to do something for yourself. To make a decision about your life and know that it is entirely up to you. Maybe you’ll decide not to go to chem class, or to buy an extra bagel for lunch. Or maybe you’ll decide to go over to that girl who was glancing at you earlier and introduce yourself, full of the knowledge that you have no idea what your future holds, but still willing to hang around and see what happens. Change in life may be inevitable, but it can still be change that’s on your terms.

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