The “College Experience”

I walked from my morning class back to my dorm, the air was cold as it always is. I took off all my layers, plopped my backpack down and began homework. It wasn’t long till I was easily distracted by the TV playing in the common room, I watched for a few minutes and then went back to work. This description of my day to a reader sounds uneventful as if this presumably happened to hundreds of kids on campus today. Is this true? Some people have told me college is the best years of their lives, some have told me it was the hardest, and some even addressed it as life changing. Leading up to my freshman year I heard so many different takes on college. It intrigued me as to how different college can be depending on what you make out of it.

It is an interesting concept that whoever you talk to about their college years could have something completely different to say. This ties into the assignment to read Geneseo’s GLOBE.  The first section titled “A Framework for Building and Assessing a Holistic Student Experience at Geneseo”. We as students hear so much about this idea of the college experience. A mother emphasizing the learning part of a student experience, or a cousin whispering make sure you really get the college experience! Everyone who steps foot onto this campus comes in with a different mindset. Some are going to sit in their dorm all day, skipping classes, blinded the pleasure part of a college experience. Some are going to spend hours on end stressing, and studying ignoring the pleasure aspect. People leave college with the person they spend the rest of their lives with, people leave college with a degree in something they love, or something they hate. People leave college with the best memories of their lives, or with only the mental images of piled up textbooks. There isn’t just one collective experience assigned to us, we as individuals have our own, some may be smarter, and some more enjoyable but your GPA, your friends, or the number of parties you attended don’t define your college experience, you do.

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