"College is the best time of your life! Enjoy it!" Teachers, parents, and others said before I went to college. At the time, going to college meant finally living by myself permanently without being confined by the chains of my parents, but it didn't have the further ramifications that I now realize it should have. Of course there's all the career opportunities, learning opportunities, practical opportunities, and life opportunities (opportunity, opportunity, opportunity!), but today I focus more on the social opportunities.
I didn't do freshman year correctly: I chose to be roommates with a high school friend. College is a time for meeting new people, and every interaction that one makes has the potential to be a lifelong relationship. It's no longer being friends with a kid because he's in your class or he's your neighbor, it's making an affirmative decision to be friends with someone. Many people go to college specifically to meet people, hence where the idea of the "MRS" degree comes from, and a large part of the value of an MBA, I assume, is to make connections for future interaction and to be able to say "I knew that CEO way back before they were CEO, I was there at the beginning!" College is a collection of young people who share the quality of having had some success in life and yearning for further success, so that already filters the general populace to a select group of people that you desire to interact with (like a Filter Results option on a dating app). (And no, I'm not advocating for people to rush a fraternity/sorority)
Now that I'm stuck in a new city with MJ during a pandemic, the contrast between our social lives comes out in full force. MJ interacted with fellow nursing students during her first semester before we reached the height of the pandemic, and now she attends clinicals and Flu Fighters (catchy name, it's giving out flu shots to undergrad students) with everyone whereas I'm stuck on conference calls with work co-workers without even seeing anyone's face (we don't use Zoom). There's definitely been times when I look at my phone contacts list and wonder who I can call during the pandemic whom I won't be bothering: Criteria I consider are 1.) do they have a kid? 2.) Do we share sense of humor? 3.) might they be working or be at a different social event? These are the times I realize that most of the friends I have are from college and law school. Sure, I've made friends outside of those arenas, but they're mostly college graduates or lawyers who I might have met anyway if I made a different decision. The farther out we get from college and grad school, the more we realize how precious those times to share were, that we can reminisce about the good ol' days with people we trust, whereas I unfortunately was still "in my shell during college" and would often spend time at the gym shooting baskets by myself or going to underground dorm room poker games. Also, interaction with people who didn't go to college with you can be a risky experience: they don't share the same values, they might envy you for having gone to college.
I often heard the phrase "youth is wasted on the young" and got puzzled about its meaning, and since I was young in college I got slightly offended of its presumptuous tone that I was "wasting" my youth. Now looking back, it seems pretty apt at least for those college times because so much of one's direction in life takes place in college or at least right after high school, where you set off on your own to become your own person and your decisions are your own, can't blame your parents for being where you are in life anymore. Each decision in college can have so many repercussions as opposed to nowadays, my life is somewhat more crystallized and the path is much more clear. In college, just deciding to talk to a person you deem interesting might set off a life's worth of events, or taking the LSAT, or taking a class, or going to a lecture about an interesting topic, or going on an alternative spring break trip. There's just more time left in life to have those kind of decisions be life-changing. So when I run around campus and see al the undergrads (especially freshmen, although I can't really tell which kids are freshman), I give them a silent message of "College is the best time of your life! Enjoy it! Make good decisions!"
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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