Opinion

Freewheeling freshmen and stressed seniors

It’s amazing how much every college student changes in four short years.

If you talk to college seniors and freshmen, it’s easy to see which is which. They’re at two different ends of the college spectrum.

We all go through the same basic changes that take us from the freshmen personality to the senior personality. So if you’re a freshman, get ready to see what your future holds.

First on the list is how much effort and money you spend on where you live. When you first come to college, you have a plan for your dorm room. You pack your car full of decorations.

By junior year, decorations will be more of an after-thought. Usually this is around the time that you realize you’d rather have money for takeout and bar tabs than make your apartment really scream “you”.

Instead of cool, trendy shelves and dishes from target, you have the old furniture that’s been in your uncle’s basement for years.

And chances are you have at least one item you found on the side of the road with a cardboard sign that read “Free!”

If you think you’re too proud for that, just wait until that first utilities bill comes in. You’ll join the dark side eventually.

You’ll do the same thing with your personal appearance. No, I don’t mean dumpster diving. I mean that your standards will drop.

You’ll become a lot more open to wearing sweatpants in class. You ladies will wear less makeup on campus. You guys won’t see anything wrong with wearing the same hoody over and over again. On the first day of classes it’s pretty easy to spot the freshmen and the seniors.

The freshmen look fantastic, almost like they walked out of a magazine. The seniors are proud of themselves for wearing clean jeans.

It makes sense.

When you’re a freshman, you’re making a first impression wherever you go.

If you’re a senior, you’ve established your social circle. Plus, that circle has already seen you being carried home at five in the morning after a Halloween party, so they know just how awful you can look.

Your attitude towards classes changes, too. Freshmen tend to show up at Tech with enough supplies to stock half of an Office Max. By the time you’re a senior, you have three pens, one no. 2 pencil for scantrons, and a few old spiral notebooks.

After years of instructors who think you can write lecture notes as fast as they speak, you learn to use minimalist studying and note-taking skills.

For those of you who use different color ink pens to organize lecture notes, get ready to kiss that goodbye.

In a lot of ways, being a freshman or senior in college is a lot like being a freshman or senior in high school.

As freshman it’s all new and exciting. You can’t understand why seniors are so cynical. As a senior, you can’t understand why the freshmen are so easygoing.

Every senior on campus has wished they could go back in time and talk themselves out of something.

We were all freshmen at one point and we know the pitfalls like deciding you don’t need an internship, or filling your schedule with fun classes that will later cause you to take multiple difficult classes at the same time.

Sometimes we feel like freshmen are acting spoiled because it’s hard for us to remember what it felt like to still have so much time left to do everything we wanted to do in college.

On the flip side, what many freshmen don’t understand is that getting ready to graduate from college is like standing on a cliff with everyone you know congratulating you because you get to jump over the edge.

So if you’re a freshman, try not to take it personally if a panicked, sleep-deprived senior rolls his or her eyes when you mention your yoga class.

And if you’re a senior, remember that an important part of being a college freshman is taking time to enjoy the experience while there’s still time to spare.