The ideal college experience

I didn’t have the escapist spring break college students are supposed to have. While friends spent their time away from school on beaches and abroad, my travels led me right back to early morning academic halls and walks across campus.

It was supposed to be an enlightening experience for my brother, a high school junior in the beginning stages of the college application process. We spent a week driving across state lines, visiting schools. We attended information sessions headed by middle-aged men with elbow patches, each of whom extolled the virtues of his college’s curriculum, faculty, and student life. We saw where students had their seminars, wrote their term papers, ate their dinners. It was all, ostensibly, to get a real feel for what daily college life was like, to allow high schoolers to form their own judgments and conclusions about what they wanted out of their college experience.

Instead, we were presented with model after model of the Ideal College Experience—one that left the high school students in the audience enraptured with excitement and anticipation, but one that left me second-guessing my past four years.

In the Ideal College Experience, your first-year roommate will be a fascinating individual from another country who will change the way you view the world forever. You will get along famously and never fight about dirty dishes. Your resident advisor will always be planning bonding trips to ice-skating rinks and Broadway shows, and you will attend every single one, without fail. Your professors will stand at the door at the end of class to ask whether you need help writing a paper or securing a summer internship, and the two of you will talk it out over drinks at the neighborhood bar. You will attend intimate teas with U.N. ambassadors, become a member of an a cappella group and a volunteer at an animal shelter and a triple major, and still somehow find time to bake cookies with friends at midnight.

To prospective students, it must have felt like life was awaiting them on those campus greens, but as someone reaching the end of her time as an undergraduate, it felt suffocating. Had I been doing it wrong? I hadn’t studied abroad—had I limited my horizons? I felt guilty for all the classes I hadn’t taken, the talks I hadn’t attended, the clubs I hadn’t started, the types of people I hadn’t met. The school literature featured pictures of young men and women studying on lawns, looking positively ecstatic, and I don’t believe that expression has ever crossed my face while studying.

Our time in college is romanticized as one of endless easy opportunities, of nonstop fun and fulfillment, and what’s most insidious about this romanticization is that its source is not just television and movies but colleges themselves. The problem comes when we incorporate those romantic notions into our own hopes for what our time in college will actually be like, creating impossible expectations and fating ourselves for disappointment. What will become of those prospective students when they finally step on campus and realize that libraries aren’t social hotspots, that building good relationships with professors involves more time and effort than admissions officers let on, and that there aren’t enough hours in a day to attend every event open to students?

It’s unnecessary disillusionment. While college does indeed offer many opportunities, they’re not endless and they’re not easy. Rather than feeling overwhelmed or discouraged by the fact that we’re unable to achieve all that a college brochure told us we could, perhaps we should define a college experience apart from the literature, information sessions, and campus tours.

Spectator published a list of “116 Columbia Traditions” in its orientation issue my first year of college. I still have the list taped to my dorm room wall, checking things off as I complete them (the latest being the Broadway Shake at Tom’s). That’s one way of outlining the success of our college careers, as silly and small as some of the traditions are, and sometimes having that sense of opportunity can compel us to do and experience things we might not have otherwise—because we were scared, because we were short-sighted.

But there’s no printed list in the world that can tell us how to find ourselves—especially not one from a college admissions office. The Ideal College Experience isn’t a checklist but a process that may or may not include studying abroad, getting involved in extracurricular activities, taking a class with a superstar professor, or making maniacally happy faces while studying. We should have the confidence and bravery to go through our undergraduate years and find our own versions of that ideal, without feeling guilt for opportunities missed.

Though, if I could suggest one thing, the Broadway Shake is really quite good.

Aarti Iyer is a Columbia College senior majoring in creative writing. She is the former editor-in-chief of The Fed. Culture Vulture runs alternate Tuesdays.