the college experience
A basketball chat, about a minimum age limit of 20 for joining the NBA, included this tidbit on the value of experiencing college:
[to an NBA player who went to college]
“You know what the college experience is. You just don’t recognize it. It’s being around people from all over the country and finding common ground with them. It’s arguing about something with someone who is from a completely different set of values and finding out their viewpoint. It’s about becoming a more well-rounded person because your perspective goes from your own safe little world surrounded by people you know to seeing what life is like elsewhere…College helps a person mature, even if that maturity isn’t immediately evident…” –SportsNation host Ken Bikoff (sorry, no link)
Well isn’t that syrupy. Actually I agree, and sometimes I really regret that I didn’t leave my town to go to school.
Excepting a few cool people, good friends, and some excellent professors, all this talk about the college experience reminds me of an honors dorm filled with drunk stupid chicks puking in the bathroom and “going out” Thursday through Sunday in my same-old same-old town, endless weekends of boredom because the only alternative to meat markets with exhorbitant cover charges and shit music, was Bible study with the Campus Christian Coalition.
I had been hoping for an intimate floor full of interesting and open-minded buddies, awash in solidarity, with whom I would have such riveting conversations every night I would sometimes even forget I had homework (I wouldn’t have had to find all those reasons to procrastinate by myself). Yeah right, I recall a maximum total of 2 awesome late-night hallway chats with random strangers the entire time I was at the dorm. Then I moved out and got an apartment, where I watched Star Trek Voyager and downloaded music for the next couple years, housebound on weekends by football traffic.
It wasn’t the school’s fault. It wasn’t even the annoying party-chicks’ faults. It was mine. I worked hard in high school and had the choice of going away to college, and I should have taken it, but I was wimpy and jaded and I enrolled myself for processing through an over-populated state school instead. If I had college to do over again…well, I’d do it over again.
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