After Camp Yale, reality sets in

By Raina Lipsitz

Just about a month ago, I was in the throes of preparing to leave for college. It seemed like the culmination of a grueling process of elimination—whittling down the number of colleges to which I wanted to apply, actually applying, getting in, and deciding where I wanted to go. Now, all I had to do was pack up my life.

HYURA CHOI/YH

I'd heard so many great things: the next four years will be the best years of your life, you'll never have this kind of freedom again, you will be treated like an adult, and you will meet great people and make life-long friends. You will shed all of the insecurities of high school, because no one will know you there. College is a clean slate.

Unfortunately, such glowing predictions drop from the mouths of bespectacled folks casting backward glances through rose-tinted lenses. It sounds harsh, but it's true—all of these words of advice, while not malicious lies, must be taken with a grain of salt. Because the more wonderful you imagine something is going to be, the worse it feels when you smack into the truth.

Talking to a friend from home last night, I realized just how much we were expecting versus how much we were getting. "I couldn't wait to get away," she confided, "But now that I'm here, so far from home, I miss walking into the local grocery store and seeing 10 people I know, and calling up the friends I've known since preschool just to talk and hang out."

I agreed wholeheartedly, and we talked about the strange feeling of being really homesick, and, at the same time, absolutely thrilled to be independent and far away from our parents. We also discussed Yale's dating scene, and our disappointment in encountering a lot of what we thought we had escaped by leaving high school. "I haven't met any men," I lamented, and she laughed. "I was complaining about that yesterday," she said, "and my suitemate said, `Where do you think college guys come from?'"

Which just goes to show you, you can't shed all the baggage from high school, at least not right away. The ghosts of secondary education haunt us still, and they don't go away just because you're with new people. They cling even tighter, digging their claws in and making us act and think and talk like we did in high school. Just because somebody doesn't know about the time you humiliated yourself in the cafeteria on the first day of sophomore year doesn't mean that you forget.

The problems you had in high school, and all your life, don't disappear when you hit college. And not only do these follow you, but a whole new crop awaits you: the fresh horrors of registration, shopping, balancing schedules, and figuring out where the hell everything is. If you've always had problems making friends, you'll still have problems making friends. If you always get homesick, you'll still get homesick. And you'll do it all while contending with dining hall food and roommates. As if moving away weren't bad enough, you have to deal with moving in with strangers.

This is not to say that nothing will ever get better, that college won't be the best four years of your life, or the place where you will meet lifelong friends (some of whom might even end up being your roommates). Obviously, these things can and will come to pass. I've only been here two and a half weeks, after all. It's still just the beginning. We know where we are, and although we don't really know where we're going, we shouldn't think we need to have everything figured out just yet. The best kind of happiness sneaks up on you and steals you away from self pity. And that's the kind worth waiting for.

Raina Lipsitz is a freshman in Trumbull.

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