“So,” the start to every first year’s most hated question, “Are you happy with freshman year so far?”
This seems like a simple question. It tends to come up at every Thanksgiving conversation, every phone call back home, or even over Snapchat from a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while. We all hope to be able to answer with “yes, I absolutely love it,” but the grief that can overwhelm us when we need to explain otherwise can be debilitating.
This question, as reasonable as it may sound, actually brings up a lot of discomfort and anxiety. And why wouldn’t it? As freshman, our entire lives have just taken a complete 180. For the most part, our friends have just been scattered across the country, our small sized classrooms have been multiplied by ten, and our position on our high school’s student council doesn’t hold much value anymore, compared to the other 23,500 undergraduate students at UWO.
Let’s be honest: first year is an emotional rollercoaster. One day you could meet your potential future housemates, and the next you could be booking a ticket back home because you can’t take another minute of studying at Weldon. However, the fact that there is so much pressure placed on freshmen that first-year must be “the time of our lives,” makes those bad days 10 times worse.
Many college students tend to be hyper-aware of their mood. There is nothing wrong with being emotionally aware. Where the problem arises is when we give in to the notion that if we aren’t happy 24/7, there clearly must be something wrong. Before university, a bad day, often, was simply a bad day. A 50% on a test could be shaken off by a nice dinner out with friends, and staying out too late one night could simply be slept off at home in your comfy bed. But now, a “bad day” seems to correlate into a “rough patch” emblematic of a much greater issue in our lives.
While we may not admit it, UWO students are often terrified that our oh-so perfectly crafted lives on social media may not match up to the way we are actually feeling. Even worse, that the lives of others are somehow better than ours. The way in which we present ourselves on social media radiates that there is one way to “do” first year: Frosh Week must be full of partying and meeting our newest lifelong best friends, exams are a breeze and we genuinely love all of our courses, and #college is the place for us. Well I don’t know about you, but there are certain days when I seem to connect more so to the phrase “University is soup, and I am a fork,” and that is OK!
Struggling to adjust to university is completely normal. There is no deadline as to when you must feel finally “at home.” For some, that could be within days, for others within months. Most of the time, bad moods do not reflect anything more than the banalities of life. Most importantly, the absence of “Instagram-worthy” moments should not act as a signal that first-year is not being done “right.”
So no, you probably shouldn’t copy-paste this article and email it to all of your relatives prior to the next family dinner in explanation as to why you will not be answering their seemingly simple question. But know that it is okay to not have a solid answer for them. You are one of many other students who feel the pressure to live up to their extravagant university expectations. For now, enjoy the rest of this semester and learn to laugh at the “bad days”… because for the most part, that is really all that they are.
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