I spent the first parentless night of my freshman year of college in my dorm room alone.
I was crying, mostly because I couldn’t figure out the mechanics of the communal bathroom faucets and had taken an ice cold shower for the first time in my life. I was halfway to convincing myself I needed to go home — after all, Indiana clearly didn’t have access to hot water, and that was a must-have.
I was also crying because I was scared. My roommate, who I had immediately known was going to be no friend of mine, had gone out for the evening, leaving me nothing to worry about except what I was doing — or rather, what I was not doing.
The summer before my freshman year, there were a million publications churning out conflicting college advice: what to pack, what to wear, who to talk to, how to interact with my professors, how to reinvent myself, what I should be drinking, where I should be partying.
Most of these teen-targeted magazines and blogs are still pumping out the same generic advice to freshman who, like myself as a tender youth, are cowering before a mountain of what-not-to-do listicles.
In my four years at IU, I’ve gone from a small, shaking, woodland animal of a freshman to a cynical, battle-hardened senior, and I plan to let the class of 2020 in on a well guarded secret: college advice is bogus.
Looking back, a few people did give me a couple of good tips, but miscellaneous college advice from strangers working for Seventeen Magazine is almost always useless.
It’s like trying to explain to a virgin what having sex is like — everyone pretends to have prophetic insights into the sensation, but the truth is that it’s a little different for everyone.
In college, as well as in sex, the most important — and perhaps only — universal lesson is to know your boundaries.
Unlike most college advice a la ‘Ten Items You Must Have to Ace Freshman Year’ or ‘How To Get the College Boyfriend You Always Wanted,’ ‘know your boundaries’ is a generic statement and will mean something vastly different to everyone. That’s part of the reason why it’s advice that has stood the test of time.
For one person, ‘know your boundaries’ will mean self-enforcing a three drink maximum at their first frat party. For another, it will mean making peace with the fact that they can only handle an hour of nerve-racking social interaction per day.
Although teen magazine editors around the country are ready to claw me to death with their perfectly manicured acrylic fingernails, I will say that both of these approaches to the minefield of college are completely valid.
The best part of college is that as long as you’re not hurting yourself or others, there are very few rules in terms of what you do, how you dress, or how you act.
So long as they know their boundaries and continue to use those boundaries as guidelines to make decisions for themselves, IU’s class of 2020 will flourish here in Bloomington, regardless of whether or not each one of them packed according to Teen Vogue’s list of must-haves.
