On Being a Freshman

As if my college experience isn’t unusual enough, I’m also going to have two years of being a freshman. Sort of. Last year, I had to adapt to life in New York City. This semester, I’m starting over in a new place with new people and a completely different language. Next semester, I’ll be switching again. If being a freshman means being in a new situation and adapting to a new culture, I’ll be a freshman for two whole years before returning to NYC as a junior. At least that’s how I see it.

Here’s the thing: I’m learning that I can’t really tell people that thought. As soon as I say that I was a freshman last year, I get cut off. The other person usually makes some comment about my being a young’un or a baby or something of the sort. From then on, in all conversations following, any point that I make can be discredited with the simple phrase “You’ll see. You ARE just a freshman.” Are? Theoretically, yes, but theoretically so is everyone else here. Technically, no. I’m no longer a freshman academically.

In some ways, I hate freshmen. I lived in the largest freshmen dorm in the US for the entirety of last year, and it was terrible. Generally speaking (and very generally, of course) freshmen are crazy. They’re loud because they’re insecure. They drink too much, smoke too much, party too much…they’re crazy and irresponsible because they don’t know who or what they are. They’re adjusting to not having a curfew but having to do their own laundry, and they just don’t know what to do with themselves. Self-control and self-respect seem to disappear without parents and teachers around to impose standards externally; who could imagine setting standards for one’s self? Freshmen pull fire alarms at 3am because they realize they can. They date other people who live on their dorm floor and they throw up in the stairways. And they think they are entitled to be as rude as they want because they’re in college with the big kids at last.

Harsh, yes? Probably too harsh. That dorm last year just was not a good time…and those are some of my more general observations.

The thing is, in other ways I feel as if I want to perpetually be a freshman. I want to experience new places, struggle to figure out the unspoken social norms of new cultures, embarrass myself attempting to communicate in languages that I haven’t yet mastered. When you’re a freshman—in high school, college, grad school, the business world, anywhere—you feel the newness of miniscule details that others easily take for granted. Freshmen are the ones who are grateful for access to a real academic library, free lectures through the school, no bed-time, stories of bad ID photos. They mark the first time someone asks them for directions on the street, and they rejoice the first time they can give accurate directions confidently in response. Freshmen notice that having the WC and shower in separate rooms is a great idea when 5 people share a living space, that dogs run around without leashes, that 7am jackhammers outside your window are not cool, and that good friends are invaluable. The freshman that I am right now is delighted because an old man turned to me today because he saw the face I made when some obscenely drunk teenagers roared past us on the way to the metro. He started speaking to me in Czech; he reached out, having mistaken me for a reserved Czech like himself, so that we could be disapproving together. I wish so much that I spoke his language, but I’m so glad he gave me that moment and affirmed that I am slowly learning his culture.

Freshmen have nothing, so they reach out toward everything. It’s a child-like way to live. I read once (in “The Tao of Pooh” I think) that the goal of growing up is to become the wise child. To develop mature reasoning and sense of self without losing the ability to find joy in the nooks and crannies of the world. Tired of being discounted and patronized, I throw off the standard definition of the freshman (and really if we’re sticking to traditional terms I don’t fit that definition anyway). Shall I be a sophomore now? A “wise fool”? No. I’ll still be a freshman, but I’m doing it my way. And I’m totally at peace with that decision.