College: A Love-Hate Relationship

College. It's something people want so they can learn more, discover more, do what they love, meet lifelong friends, expand their horizons... It's a place for learning, a place for fun and doing what you want, a place for independence, a whole new lifestyle... 


...And yet, it's a place where you walk around and find people crying, people sleeping in chairs or on benches or on the floor, people hunched over computers, people walking every level of the library trying to find a computer, people waiting in line for financial aid, people waiting in line for academic advising, people tearing their hair out, more people sleeping, people in the bookstore selling their soul for that last textbook... and if you're in the music department, you see twice as many people sleeping, people spending extra hours in their day practicing, and stand-offs between choir kids and instrumentalists...


...and we won't even start on the amount of construction going on....


Don't get me wrong, I think college is wonderful. I love the idea of getting to take classes you actually like as well as classes you hate or don't feel like you need to take. I love the variety and the chances I have, especially here at BYU-I, to try new things and to do what I enjoy or want to learn. But at the same time there is an incredibly amount of stress involved, and that stress can begin days before a semester actually begins! For me, it was showing up in the Music Department to find my trumpet auditions involve triple-tonguing, and for someone who can't even double-tongue, this is a problem. It doesn't help that this is for Moussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition", which is something I'm DYING to play. Another stressful part is going to advising centers to beg them to accept more credits from my previous college so I don't have to take the same classes over again. I swear the panels draw slips of paper out of a hat that either says "ACCEPT" or "NOT ACCEPT" and that's how it is.

And then there's the issue of college kids not knowing what they want with their college career. Everyone always told me, "Oh, you know what you want now? Ha! That'll change." I always thought, No, actually, it won't, but thanks! And lo and behold, I'm in that situation now. What do I want with my degree? How do I want to best utilize it? Are the clusters that I've selected really what I want? What about this? I could try that. But I don't want to have to transfer again if Dan finishes, do I have time to change? Maybe I shouldn't... But I think I might want to... But what if I try it and I don't like it? Then I'm stuck again! Maybe I should just take the classes I want, and then if we move before I finish then oh well, too bad, I didn't finish college. Or maybe I should just not worry and suffer through another college transfer... maybe that would be better than trying to juggle everything perfectly... There is no light at the end of the tunnel for me yet, and it's the worst possible time to not know what I want.


So as someone who is literally halfway through her college career, I'm at the point where I'm asking myself: "As a college student, who am I? Where am I going? What do I want here? What's the best way to achieve that?" And as a college student, I don't know how to go about answering these questions.


College and I have a love-hate relationship. We don't know what's going on. If I were in a relationship with college and it went facebook official, it would be labeled as "It's complicated."