What Freshman Year Has Taught Me

My parents dropped me off at school with nothing else but a couple of overstuffed suitcases, a few good-natured “good lucks” and multiple drawn-out hugs. I think I might’ve even seen my dad shed a tear. Wow, this really must be happening, I remember thinking. Then they shut the truck doors, drove away, and left me standing on the sidewalk. Wow, that really did just happen, I also remember thinking.

I’m a pretty regular crier, but after willing myself to walk back into my less-than-ideal dorm room with my new best friend Perry The Cockroach (he was dead, so that was telling of my current situation), I only cried a little. Perry was kind of being a party pooper, and didn’t seem to have his rent payments under control, so I kicked him out. Then I felt a little better.

I spent the rest of the afternoon a bit unnerved, like I had been dropped off at summer camp, but with assignments and soon-to-be frigid weather and these awful things called 8AMs. Then I realized college was basically summer camp, minus the good parts, and also you have to pay a billion dollars for everything. But I figured that was all okay because I’d heard really great things about the food.

The rest of that first evening was spent with my roommate, who was a lot better to hang out with than Perry. I was worried; I’d heard horror stories of friends who’d gone to college with roommates who constantly messed with the thermostat and ate hard boiled eggs with the door shut. Luckily, we didn’t have a thermostat (or air conditioning), and when I met my roommate at Panera over the summer, she had ordered mac and cheese. I strongly believe mac and cheese is a food of the sensible. Nobody ordering mac and cheese would ever eat hard boiled eggs in confined spaces.

The neighbors upstairs were a different story. For whatever reason, they really liked dropping marbles on the floor, which we could hear through our ceiling. I’ve only met them once, when they’d knocked on our door holding the note we’d written asking if they could quiet down. It was almost finals week, and by that point, they must’ve ordered a few hundred marble bags in bulk. The letter was polite; we’d scribbled little smiley faces and hearts to ease the tension, much like two second graders playing suck-up to the teacher. They weren’t smiling when I opened the door. In fact, I’d predict they’re not all that fond of mac and cheese.

Needless to say, things only got worse after that. They continued dropping their marbles; we were losing ours. We finally found refuge in a small plastic cup stored in my drawer from the previous Gobblerfest. The cup was from Valley Women’s Clinic, adorned with the words, It's what’s inside that counts. Well, what I had inside was frustration, as did my roommate. So we found immense joy in banging the echoey cup on the ceiling, creating various tunes between howls of laughter. Since then, I think the girls upstairs have donated some of those marbles.

The Cup, however, doesn’t solve the public shower problem. I’ve learned to shower at odd times of the day, to avoid the arctic blasts that come with 20 people bathing at once. One of the shower heads sounds like a dying dolphin, and there’s not much to do about that besides clench my teeth and pray the water doesn’t abruptly go cold. It usually still does. So I take quick showers, and I try to avoid eye contact with the mysterious substances and hair art painted on the walls. For a technology-dominated school, we’ve got some real shower-Picassos among us.

Everyone says to “step out your comfort zone” to find friends freshman year. I stepped out my door, and that seemed to be enough, because I’ve become good friends with the girls directly across the hall. We bonded over Bob L'éponge (France’s version of SpongeBob), along with my roommate's and my copious collection of Tony’s Chocolonely. I’d recommend anyone looking for friends to keep some Tony’s on-hand. It’s a very effective investment.

We’ve expanded our friend group, meeting more kind faces from our building and classes, through friends of friends. It’s a decently small group, but it’s our group, and I wouldn’t want it any other way—even if half our Tony’s collection disappeared by the second week of school. Also, now my roommate and I have more people to bang cups on the ceiling with, which I find deeply satisfying. None of them carry around marbles either—at least to my knowledge. So that’s a win.

We’ve tried the party thing, and standing in someone’s sticky, hot house completely sober isn’t my flavor of enjoyment. My ideal Friday night consists of curling up under absurdly heavy weighted blankets with my nose in a book. The occasional outing is fine, and my friends agree with this—but our weekend adventures lie in stuffing twelve people in Blackburg's Waffle House while fighting over who has aux for the jukebox. The servers loathe us, and I publicly apologize. However, I’d put waffles up there on the “sensible food list” with mac and cheese. Maybe I’m biased.

Currently, I’ve only one semester under my belt. I could go on and on—I suppose those classes I attend are alright, too—but I’ve learned a lot more than just linguistic morphology. College is a weird concept: a bunch of clueless kids are thrown into the deep end of academia and independence—and for the first time, we’re meant to figure ourselves out. It’s a messy time. But between the late night talks with my roommate, the sunsets on the Drillfield, and those D2 dinners? I wouldn’t trade it for the world—even if I lose a couple marbles along the way.