For those who don’t know, I have been writing a nonfiction book about my undergraduate experience at UPenn, Oxford, and Cambridge since my freshman year.
It began as a humorous how-to guide for navigating the Ivy League landscape and grew into something more vulnerable, earnest, and emotionally honest as the years went on.
It is now a coming-of-age tale set within the isolated, hyper-competitive, almost-mythologized belly of the beast (academia) itself.
The excerpt below is a mix-and-match patchwork quilt of notes and short asides I wrote during my first year at UPenn when I was 19 years old, squished together into a longer piece.
Back then, I anthropomorphized the concept of being at University until it loomed in my consciousness like a living, breathing creature that I wanted to form a direct relationship with, examine, and admire. I felt like an archeologist, a sociologist, and a giggling fan meeting a celebrity.
I was enthralled by the freedoms of living away from home for the first time. I remember the excitement, the sense of being a part of something special—a chosen family—and of course, the underlying fear that I didn’t belong.
I also remember that fire drill.
Swamp Creature
A word of advice: if there are signs outside of your dorm warning you about an emergency drill the next day, write it down so you will remember. And if you decide to take a nap, keep a change of clothes within easy reach of your bed.
As you may already suspect, I was sleeping when the emergency alarm went off today in my university dorm.
In retrospect, I guess it is pretty impressive that I managed to stumble over to my clothes, blink at myself in the mirror, locate my dorm room’s door, and stumble out into the hall...all in time to run into the cute boy I’ve been crushing on for the past three weeks.
Crush: "You look tired."
Me: "Grrrraaaaaggggh."
Encountering a gorgeous human while personally looking like a swamp creature that just woke up from an enchanted sleep is embarrassing, but I’ve had worse Wednesdays.
I’m just thankful that my family wasn’t around to witness my shame and decide to tease me about it for years. In fact, if I don’t tell them, the chances of my family finding out about the moment my crush decided to never fall in love with me is slim.
This is a level of privacy and self-protection I didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy prior to coming to university.
When you finally move out of the nest and head off to college, your relationship with your family changes. Let me clarify; it improves.
This is on account of many factors—one of them being that there is much less sneaking around. If you don’t want your parents to see the disaster zone that used to be your room, or have to explain why your roommate is drunkenly passed out naked on their bed from a party that you definitely didn’t go to, just don’t press video chat.
University is like an invisibility cloak for everything you want kept hidden from your family.
Mostly.
Every so often, a parent will visit their son or daughter at school. They are easily recognizable due to the pile of laundry in their arms and the look of distaste on their face as they look around at your beloved home.
Last semester, my friend Mary invited her mother to stay on campus for one week, and to sleep in Mary’s bed for the same amount of time. Mary’s mother’s presence inspired a flurry of activity. Specifically: activity geared towards avoiding her.
For the length of Mary’s mother’s visit, my dormmates and I developed a highly specialized method of communication called “fear texting” to inform each other which common rooms in the dorm were safe to go into (empty ones), and which to avoid at all costs.
It was like playing a real-life game of minesweeper. Any unfortunate soul who found themselves in the same room as Mary’s mother would text their location to the rest of the group and encourage evasive maneuvers. Similarly, if someone walked past a room and saw Mary’s mother inside, it was their job to warn others.
For an entire week, we operated like a mini spy ring.
We had nothing personal against Mary’s mom, but she was a parent: a forbidden entity—a force of social responsibility and moral behavior that we wanted no part of.
She was a parent, and, by proxy, the Party Pooper Extraordinaire. She noticed when we wore the same shirt for the third day in a row and when we ate fries for breakfast and Twizzlers for lunch.
Like our own mothers, she had eyes in the back of her head. She towered over us with a terrifying motherly presence and told us everything we already knew and were emotionally running away from about the ways in which we were conducting our lives.
Mixing the parent and student species in a dorm environment is startling to say the least. As the weaker species, you find yourself deferring to the parent’s opinion and instinctively apologizing for mysterious offenses.
The safe space is transformed into a danger zone where you repeatedly make errors without knowing it until they are too late to fix (or hide), and then your life is hindered by the psychological pain of the disapproval of the only parental authority figure present.
It's like walking through a puddle without noticing it until hours later, when you realize that your leg is soaking and you're shivering from head to toe. Except that it happens everyday.
It’s not our fault we’re stumbling slobs and/or life wrecks.
...Well, maybe it is.
There should be some kind of life checklist a student has to fulfill before they are deemed stable enough to go off to university and live by themselves.
For example:
Learn how to start eating ice cream without finishing the whole pint
Become proficient at making grown-up phone calls
Buy your own socks
Schedule a doctor's appointment for yourself
Refill a prescription
Don't burp in front of strangers
To be fair, I’m not sure how helpful that checklist would be--especially since I’ve only achieved four of them. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
Perhaps little surrogate-parent-pamphlets should be passed around reminding us to have safe sex and that it’s not healthy to roll out of bed and spray whipped cream directly into your mouth as an early morning routine (not that that would stop me).
Maybe the next time my friends and I get the stink eye from a visiting parent, we should claim to be conducting a postmodern living art critique of today’s youth culture. That way, we’re being incompetent on purpose.
Perfect. This will work. There are zero flaws in this plan.