The Top 10 Things I Learned in College

When my son two months ago, I was filled with all sorts of emotions: excitement for his new adventure, fear that he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demands, and an increasingly strong sense of envy. 

I never went away to school. Hell, I never even went to school. My post-high school life came at a time when going to college wasn’t a “given” and growing up in a single-parent household meant money was tight. But not anymore, my friends! 

If my 18-year old can go to college, so can his 50-year old mother!

I am now half-way into my freshman year at Suffolk County Community College and I have already learned so much. If any of you should decide to return to school after a rather extended departure, here are the top 10 things you need to know:

10. Pick your seat wisely the first day of class. Students are territorial and that seat will be yours for the duration of the class. They’re like salmon returning to spawn and you better learn to swim upstream with the rest of them.

9. Remember that kid in class that liked to hear himself speak? Who asked questions right to the very end of class? Who just as you thought you were safe asked if there was homework?  He’s still there.

8. 90% of students are in constant motion. Shaking their legs, tapping their feet, or twirling their pencils. It’s a bit like a circus. I’m not sure if it’s boredom, nervous energy or a way to keep awake, but it is annoying and strangely contagious.

7. You will come across many people with distracting holes in their faces, many of which are festooned (a word not used enough) with shiny things, making them even further distracting.

6. Saggy pants are apparently still “in fashion” and are still quite ridiculous.

5. A lot of girls are named “Brittany” and “Ashley.”

4. When you are the only “non-traditional” student in a class (read: the only one wearing bifocals), the professor already knows your name the first day.

3. Most young girls are terribly meek, ridiculously quiet and tremendously unsure of themselves. Parents of girls: work on that.

2. A lot of people don’t pronounce the first “T” in “important.” “Impor-ant.” What is that?

1. 18-year olds (who are not your children) are a lot nicer than you think they are. I was certain I would be ignored and perhaps even shunned by my classmates, but I was happily surprised. Kids want to get to know me and work with me. I’m not looked at as “the mom” but as a fun, vibrant, and in the case of Chemistry, an equally lost student. 

As I sit in the student lounge at SCCC, I see all the bizarre ways I both fit in and don’t fit in to the college life here.  I’m proud of myself for tackling it and for learning to stretch my brain in directions I never thought it could go.  Stoichiometry?  Really?  Now… off to my Psychology class!