17 Important College Lessons

After nearly four years of studying stuff (mostly journalism), it’s safe to say I’m an infallible expert when it comes to college.

Courtesy of mardy78 and Flickr.com

I’m kidding. I’m actually very fallible, just ask Taylor, whom I fell hard for in the second grade. (Sometimes I write things and wonder if I’m the only person who will laugh at it.)

As I was saying, I’ve spent four years absorbing the information that will form the foundation for my future. I’ll now share this acquired (purchased) knowledge with you. You’re welcome.

1. Buying new books instead of used ones is like paying more money for something you could pay less money for.
2. You meet people and forget nearly all their names. However, I’ve observed many males use a foolproof strategy to overcome this. They call a girl girl and a guy man, but they call groups of girls guys and groups of guys ladies. It was all very confusing at first.
3. You don’t have to be a good writer to be a journalist. This new development comes courtesy of the digital age, and all the while the newspaper industry struggles. Correlation? You tell me.
4. PE classes are a joke. Hundreds of dollars to learn a pick-and-roll? Hundreds of dollars to play badminton, which you can do for free? I drop my PE classes so fast people started calling me Ben Stein.
5. Whoever is talking to you, whatever they’re talking about, regardless of their gender or hair color, they’re just thinking about sex.
6. Rowing is more painful than other excruciatingly painful things.
7. Double D’s are man’s best friend. There’s nothing better than having one of those on a dark and rainy night. Shout out to designated drivers everywhere.
8. Everyone stresses the importance of networking like it’s this skill that you must consciously develop every minute, which is what I do, but I just call it something else: being a human.
9. Advertising majors spend four years learning to draw their thought processes. Or maybe that’s PR majors–I get the two confused.
10. To run to class is to surrender. Never surrender.
11. Food tastes twice as good when someone makes it for you.
12. In love, nothing good gets away. (Thank you, Mr. Steinbeck.)
13. Trees are useful objects for analogies.
14. On heartbreak: Just as a tree grows slowly, so must a heart mend. In time, it will become full as a pine, strong as a baobab.
15. On writing: Words have roots, like trees. Your words are limbs for your reader to climb to see above the forest line.
16. On relationships: The bird flies south without knowing which tree it will land on, yet still it flies south.
17. On ideas: Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Except a baobab.

I’ve learned a lot in four years, and this isn’t the place to publish it all. But don’t fret, for those are the seventeen most important things I’ve learned.