By Shayne 

Well, just about every college graduation has occurred, and “Summer Break” is in full swing. 

Some of us are officially one year removed from college now, while others have the whole experience directly in the rear-view mirror.

Whether you’re looking back on  a college career that occurred years, months, or even weeks ago, there will inevitably be aspects of those carefree days that we’ll particularly long for…and several that we won’t.

Here’s a list of 5 Things We Miss (and Don’t Miss) From College.

Let the nostalgia begin:

 

 

1. Living Close to Your Friends

Boy, did we take this for granted.

One of the best parts of inhabiting a “college town” is that you live blocks away from nearly everyone you’ve ever met at school. Whether it’s old friends from the dorms, current friends who live with you, or some future friends who you’ve yet to bump into, the sense of community built by this close radius often made us forget that people who weren’t 18-23 even existed.

Hell, a 10-minute bike ride to your friend’s place was considered “far”.

These days, it takes about two trains, 30 minutes of walking,  and a $15 Uber ride to see just one of your friends.

Among all the things listed above, this might be the one that resonates the most with post-grads. Your squad goes from 15 close-knit people to about 5 subgroups of 3–and that’s if you’re lucky.

Make no mistake: we will never live as close to all of our friends as we did in college.

And if you went to a “commuter school”, then I only have one thing to say to you: Lol.

 

 

2. Flexible Schedules

An underappreciated aspect of Universidad was our ability to orchestrate our class and work schedules.

Barring certain courses, we pretty much were able to lay out our curriculum to better suit our circadian tendencies.

Early bird? Morning classes.

Wine Wednesday enthusiast? No Thursday classes.

Senior? No Friday classes…or Monday classes….or Tuesday classes…?

When it came to work, playing the “I’m a full-time student” card was a fast track to laying out our shifts in the same manner that we did our classes.

Fun right?

Yeah, the adult world is nothing like that.

We kinda just work the same 8 hour shift. Every day. Forever.

Like sleeping in? Get fired.

Wine Wednesday enthusiast? Hangover on Thursday….at work.

Tuesday softball league? Your ass better be going pro.

Well, at least there’s no scheduling conflicts that can totally kill you–because your life is basically over anyway.

 

 

3. Relatively Accessible Sex

Graduation instantly made a lot of us go from straight Dragonslayers to sexual plebes overnight. Simply put: the state of California isn’t the only thing currently having a drought. (2018 Note: the state of California was experiencing a bad drought when this was first published.)

All those “booty call hours” and “side piece” jokes were a LOT funnier when they actually applied to us, right?

Now, there are a lot of factors that explain this phenomenon. The first is obviously time…or lackthereof. You basically have to send your partner a Google calendar invite for sex these days, since starting an adult career is so initially time consuming.

This also ties into the proximity thing that I mentioned earlier, too. Back then, you could drunkenly text your ex and have him/her come over before you could realize that it was a terrible idea. Now, you have enough time to think about it, remember that you hate him/her, and go to sleep alone and sexually frustrated.

Oh yeah: and you’d be amazed by how much your standards drop as a result. I caught myself checking out a cactus the other day. Like…a literal cactus.

 

 

4. Having an Alcohol Tolerance

Hey, I never said this list had to be good things that we miss.

In the glory days, we could throw so many drinks down with ease that it makes our current selves nauseous just thinking about it.

Since (ideal) postgrad life equates to less free time and more responsibility, it’s tough to maintain any semblance of a drink tolerance.

I can’t even have half a beer these days without the world starting to spin. The upside to this is that it takes less drinks to get hammered–and bars are expensive.

And if anyone still drinks like they did in college (volume and frequency), there’s an adult term for that: a potential alcoholic.

 

 

 

5. Vacations

Remember these?

I’m only one year removed from school, and I still can’t believe that we’d get anywhere between 1-12 weeks COMPLETELY OFF. Most of our best memories were spent during these breaks, whether we were traveling around or spending entire summers dicking around with our friends.

In the adult world, there’s a different name for weeks on end of no responsibility: unemployment.

 

 

5 Things We Don’t Miss:

 

1. The Unending Feeling That Something is due

Granted, one great thing about postgrad is that once you leave work, you’re done.

You can completely check out and do whatever the f*ck you want since you don’t have any homework or studying to do.

College sometimes felt like the Grim Reaper was constantly following you around with a whiteboard full of upcoming assignments. No matter where you went, or any type of fun you had, there was always this feeling in the pit of your stomach that you should be more productive.

There’s still a Grim Reaper following me around, but his whiteboard has a bunch of annoying stuff now, like “You’ll be single forever” and “Don’t forget to take the trash out”.

 

2. Being Broke

While it’s funny looking back and telling stories about how we scraped by in college, it wasn’t actually as fun at the time.

At one point, I had $1.07 in my bank account. After my first year, I had about 64 cents. Luckily, I had amazing friends (and an awesome Freshman girlfriend–hi Angie!) who shared some of their food that week so I wouldn’t starve to death.

There was a certain sense of camaraderie among students in how little money we had. We’d help each other out when times were tough, and it ultimately brought us all closer together.

And if you’re one of those people those people who called themselves broke for eating Top Ramen even though their parents paid their rent and tuition: you can’t sit with us.

 

 

 

3. Uncertainty About the Future

In addition to the unending feeling that something was due, an increasingly strong sensation throughout college was our anxiety about our future plans.

Right next to the Grim Reaper with the whiteboard was a parrot who would repeat “WHAT ARE YOU DOING AFTER GRADUATION??” very, very loudly.

Thinking about the future caused us to reconsider our entire college lives. We started thinking whether we picked the right major, chose the right extracurriculars, or surrounded ourselves with the right group of peers. This culminates in a feeling of self-doubt in our own abilities and potential for success.

While it doesn’t necessarily go away, the feeling transforms from fear of the future to existential exploration of the present. There’s nothing to fear during postgrad because you’re already in it, so we instead start self-exploring what we really want out of life and what makes us truly happy.

This is much more manageable than what we went through in college, since we now can take an active role in shaping our lives instead of dreading what’s to come.

 

 

4. FOMO

It doesn’t matter how active you were in college: odds are that you often felt like you were missing out. The abundance of social media these days certainly doesn’t help, either.

We would take a 15 minute nap and wake up to Snapchats of our friends walking on the moon, wrangling wild bulls, and climbing Mt. Everest. Whether or not they were actually doing all that stuff is tough to say, but it sure seemed like it.

Little did we know that Social Media is literally full of the best moments of everyone’s lives, and that 99% of our peers were sitting at home doing nothing like everyone else most of the time.

As an adult, it’s much more obvious that no one’s life is all that exciting. Mostly because the intensity of social media posts decreases to things like making dinner, riding a treadmill, or procrastinating at work.

Misery loves company.

(2018 Update: FOMO is still very much a thing in postgrad life. But now instead of cool parties or whatever, we see marriages and kids and shit.)

 

5. School In General

How funny.

What’s one of the things we miss least about school?

Well….school.

Lectures that make Church look like a WWE match, taking what seems like the same 3 major courses but with different names, and learning to run solely on caffeine are things none of us will long for once we drunkenly stumble across that graduation stage.

…right?

Now that I think about it, all of those moments were somewhat bearable because we experienced all of them with people we’re going to know for the rest of our lives.

Our classmates weren’t always our best friends, but we’ll still be stoked to run into any of them down the line, because we made our way through the struggle together. I know people who I had classes with all 4 years, and while we probably can’t even name one another, we’ll still recognize someone who we literally grew up next to for so long, and I think that’s really beautiful.

….oops, got a little sappy there. What I meant to say was: “fuck finals!”.

 

Thanks for reading!

I hope you enjoyed this gut-wrenching trip down memory lane. If you don’t agree with any of these entries, or want to chip in any that I might have missed, please let us know in the comments!

And for those of you lucky souls who still have time left in your college hourglasses: don’t worry, your time will come. Enjoy it while you still can.

-SP

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Ttuwvpv9s