Dear First Years (a letter you should read)

Dear First Years,

You’ve probably heard it a million times.

“Your university years are going to be the best time of your life!”

Let’s be clear now: I’m not exactly here to shatter that dream. It certainly has been the best time of my life so far.  I have met and even made friends with incredibly interesting, intelligent, and kind people.  I have enamoured myself with academic passions, and have found means to satiate my lust for learning.  I have loved and (I hope) been loved.  In a way, university makes me feel like a happy little atomic particle freely moving around in open space.

But.

But that doesn’t mean you should put unrealistic expectations on yourself or your experience.  Here at the Blog Squad, we tend to highlight the ups of university, not the downs.  Oh, we may mention the downs but rarely do we  truly explore them.  We’re sort of like the complete opposite of the journalism industry in that way.

There are downs.  Maybe you take long commutes and are having difficulty making any lasting friends.  Maybe you live in residence and you feel like you don’t belong there on Friday nights.  Maybe you have serious troubles paying rent and tuition at the same time and it affects everything else in your life.  Maybe you or a friend are assaulted at a party and the perpetrator gets away with it.  Maybe you develop an eating disorder, depression, or other illness. Maybe you try your best and your marks never go up and you feel like a failure.  Maybe your professor is not treating you with respect or using unfairly leveraging their power over you.  Maybe you’re stressed out thin and feel like it will never end.  Maybe you’re going through problems I can’t even think of.  Or maybe you pretend everything is going perfectly well—heck, maybe everything is, and yet you’re still feeling down.

It’s not like university is some weird phase in one’s life where –poof- all life’s sufferings disappear.  Don’t  trust the photos in the university brochures for the whole picture because they never photograph any of the above circumstances.

All I want to say—to first years, and anyone else who might be reading this, is that:

1) Expecting too much is unhealthy.  Be realistic about your goals and work towards them with your best effort.  Realize, truly (not just theoretically), that there are both ups and downs.

2)  That there are resources on campus (and off campus) provided by both peers and professionals that are here to help you help yourself.  And no, you don’t have to be going through really traumatic events in order to use these services. 

3) That you can still have great, fantastic times at university even if you experience circumstances like the ones given above.  Ups and downs, remember—not just ups but not just downs either. 

So take it easy, my dears.

Sincerely,
With love,
A third year student.