College 101: Tips for the scared freshie

The air seems different when June comes around. The scent of rain signals a start for students – with gloomy faces – to trek back to school. It has been a while since I was in school but I cannot help but feel a bit nostalgic every time this time comes around.

Coincidentally, I have a teammate who just graduated from high school and is about to enter college. This made me even more nostalgic since I realized how ancient I’m turning. Let me give college tips one last go.

I consider college one of the best years in my life. It is saying goodbye to the restrictiveness of high school and saying hello to freedom and self-expression; no more school administrators to nag you if your hair is too long. It is a time when one’s personality comes out and blooms. Putting it in lay man’s term – you suddenly find out that the cool guys from your high school are no longer that cool and the nerds transform into babe/dude magnets.

Unlike in high school when teenagers can easily succumb to peer pressure, in college, while the peer pressure is still there, the independence and sense of self you develop bar you from succumbing to it. You can afford to be yourself, no longer pretending to be someone you are not (if ever you were like this in high school), the right circle of friends will come and repel the bad ones. You discover new abilities you never thought you had – like being a people person or deciphering the good folks from the social climbers. Without you realizing it, college broadens one’s perspective, introducing you to a much bigger scheme of things. You’re no longer inside a box that may have contained you in high school.

For us who have been there and done that, it is quite fun to reminisce about college from time to time, and laugh about it now and flinch about how baduy we looked then. I remember during my first year in college, text messaging was still new, the Spice Girls were about to disband and Erap was about to become president. Play Station 1 was not yet extinct – it was difficult getting my schoolwork done because I had to get rid of guys from my car pool who loved to over stay their welcome by playing the consul. A person was considered cool if one owned a Nokia 5110. One could still live without cable TV for the local shows were still bearable. I remember my college buds even talked about how they cried after watching an episode of Maalaala Mo Kaya.

No one knew what metrosexual meant. Who could have known we could upstage women in vanity or at least in putting more goo on our faces? And I had to put up with the boring barber’s haircut. What was hip then is the exact opposite of what is hip now – even if it was just a few years back. Who could forget the baggy clothes? The first and last time those elephant pants would ever become hot. Compared to the muscle-fitted shirts guys wear now, we were like walking hangers because our closets were filled with large and extra large shirts. So, the way I looked then was less than desirable and was more on the dorky side.

It may be fun to reminisce about it now, but I was scared of the uncertainties that lay ahead then. One is finally getting out of one’s comfort zone, as I put it then, "Toto, I think we’re no longer in Alabang." Around this time back in 1997, enrollment was going on. I was in a whole new environment, in my case in downtown Manila – chaotic, polluted, congested and so different from the comforts of suburban Alabang. My high school friends back were kind enough to accompany me to my enrollment. We were like one van-load, more like a battalion. It is better to chart the unknown in good company; actually one can easily distinguish freshmen students because they are always huddled in groups, like scared puppies.

I never thought I would picture myself navigating the streets of downtown Manila, specifically walking around Recto – this stretch of asphalt is on any given school day a picture-perfect postcard of vehicular and human chaos. To grab a cheap lunch along its endless carinderias, mom would never have thought I would eat street food, or to rush a school report by paying a typist because you forgot that there was a paper due on that day. But before reaching Recto from Mendiola, one had to play patintero with the jeeps – a skill I still find handy to this day. Not to mention one had to be on alert for pickpockets and assorted other cretins that inhabit the underbelly of society.

In four years, Manila has grown on me. The vehicles and people who cram the streets and whatever available space there to create a heaving, stewing mass of humanity no longer intimidate me. In fact, I actually miss them.

Regardless of what era one spent their college years in, it leaves an impression. Those who are still in college might consider it a bit hellish and stressful, wanting very badly to graduate and get the heck out. But once these students graduate and join the wonderful world of the unemployed, they look back and actually yearn for it. I’ve known people who have somewhat enjoyed their college life a little too much they were already in college while I was still in high school; they were still there when I was about to graduate. I can say I made the most out of my college years, I literally lived in school, starting the day at 6 a.m. for swim practice and ending it at 9 p.m. There are times, to really savor something, it is better to have it only in a limited amount of time.

Fact is, words cannot describe those four years of college. You learn about the theories of humanity in the first hour, and experience reality in the next.

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E-mail the author at ketsupluis@yahoo.com.