When I was in Second Grade, we had a project where we wrote about our dreams. We picked a dream and posted our dream on a star out in the hallway. As a seven year old child, my dream was to get a scholarship and go to college. I wrote that on my construction-paper star and put it on the wall next to all the other poorly cut-out stars. My peers dreamed of becoming ballerinas or doctors or baseball players. I dreamed of a high education and not having to pay for it. My dreams have always been pretty realistic, even from a young age. I should be very proud of myself, because ten years later I was accepted to all six colleges I applied to and received scholarships of varying amounts from each one.
We dream to go to college and we dream to not have to pay a fortune for it. We dream of a higher education and of having that college experience. But how do you know you will pick the right college? How do you know you are going to like it?
I went to countless seminars and read articles on a daily basis about picking the right school. I did all my research and worked very hard to assure myself that I was on the right track to picking the perfect school for me. These articles and seminars promise that you will be able to find a college that you will love. You attack that overwhelming process of touring schools, filling out applications, and reading up on the schools with a positive attitude. Unfortunately, you soon realize how hard it will be to really know which school is right for you.
You will know what the campus looks like. You will know what majors and minors are available. You will know how big classes are, if the school is religious, how many students there are, and about all the clubs that are listed on their websites.
What you do not know about is how you will like it there and how you will fit in on campus. You do not know what parties will be happening. You do not know how many people are drinking or if your neighbors across the hall will be smoking marijuana. You do not know what kind of people attend the school. You can get an understanding of how many games the hockey team will win and how much your professors will be able to help you if you are struggling, but you will have no idea what to expect socially.
I am a victim of college websites, seminars, and tour guides not telling me what I needed to know. I am a victim of not learning what questions to ask. I am a victim of being sheltered from the information I needed to understand in order to be well informed about choosing my college.
If I had known about what the social life was like at my college, I can guarantee that I would never have chosen this school. Every single weekend there are loud parties with music and drinking. I smell marijuana too often and every Saturday when I wake up, the path to the cafeteria is strewn with empty beer cans.
One of the reasons I chose the school I did was because I am Catholic and I wanted to go to a Catholic school. I wanted to be able to stay on campus to go to church and I wanted a school with religious values and a large number of Catholic people. What going to this Catholic school really means is that you have to walk a mile to the church in the freezing cold on Sundays to see the same twenty people at church. It means you have to take two religion courses that do not even focus on Catholicism as part of your core classes. It does not mean that there will be a lot more Catholic people than normally, and it certainly does not mean that the students will live by Catholic values.
Nobody tells you that everyone will drink. I figured when I came to college, only about half of the people or so would drink. I can count on one hand the people I know that do not drink at all. I absolutely hate being around drunk people and I do not like parties at all. I cannot stand being around people who are loud and incoherent. I detest dancing in a room where I cannot move due to the number of people in the tiny room. I was not informed that I would be expected to attend these parties and enjoy them.
Nobody told me that I was supposed to take the social aspect of college into consideration equally as much as the academic aspect. Although "nobody" told me, I do not even have a someone to blame. I cannot blame the colleges. They would never want to advertise the amount of underage drinking and how they have campus police ignore it for our "safety". I cannot blame the seminars because they were geared towards the parents, telling them to look for academically strong colleges that their children would be able to thrive in. I cannot even blame myself, because I was told by every source to focus on academics and that I would find the right social groups by just being myself. I was told that I would find people that were like me just by being at college. I can certainly assure you that I have not. I have friends. In fact, I have some of the best friends anyone could ever ask for. I love them so much, but they are not the types of friends I thought I would make. I thought I would find a bunch of people like me, but I did not. I thought I would thrive in the college I picked, because I would thrive anywhere...right? At least that is what I was told...
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