“Great! High school totally prepared me for life as a full-time college student,” said no one ever.
Being a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, I followed the enduring pattern for all incoming students. I signed up and attended SOAR, scheduled all of my classes, moved into my dorm room and finally accepted Madison as my new home for the next few years. So there I was, just some kid from a one-stoplight town who attended a small school in middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin, finding myself in a city that seemed to never sleep. Welcome week turned out to be quite an experience in of itself. While I wandered the streets trying to find my classes in preparation of the weeks to come, I discovered the side of Madtown that was fabled by peers, but feared by my parents.
My God — alcohol is like another religion here in Madison. People worship it, make sacrifices for it and even rearrange their schedules around it. For many students on campus, the weekends seem to be an inebriated blur until the Sunday evening homework list sobers them up again. With the disappearance of constant parental influence and the relatively “laissez-faire” policies of the campus police department on the subject of alcohol, the bottle almost reigns as king in this college town. Drinking occurred in high school, but never at this magnitude. Madison has taken it to a whole new level.
At least with collegiate drinking, I had an idea of what I could experience. Movies like “Animal House” and “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder” showed me Hollywood’s interpretation of college life, but I still hadn’t seen the truth until I arrived on campus. However, the academic side of college is home to many things for which I was not at all prepared.
Everyone hears horror stories and stereotypes of college with professors who can’t speak a lick of English, lecture halls filled with hundreds of students or even getting lost trying to find classes across campus, but no one is ever actually ready for it. Personally, it hit me like a brick.
I had already found my classrooms and lecture halls earlier in the week, so I had that part covered, but my first math lecture was rather unsettling. I was surrounded by a couple hundred kids, and my professor burned through the topic at the speed of light, turning the lecture into a race to write down as much as I could. I walked out dazed and confused, feeling less intelligent than when I walked in. The worst part was the lecture was meant to be a review of what I learned last year, and there I was questioning whether I was going to survive the semester. Everything I had learned in my four years of high school didn’t do jack squat for me that day.
That experience proved to me that high school does very little in the area of actually preparing a student for life in college. Society had at least given me a rough idea of the nightlife of college. Movies, music and stories from my friends who had older siblings instilled a somewhat glorified vision of this social aspect, but I never could have truly known until I saw it for myself. The academic issues, on the other hand, nearly came out of the blue. Nothing in high school could have prepared me for that first day. In fact, I don’t think high school itself could ever hope to fully prepare someone for every aspect of college life, maybe not even the majority of them. The only thing we can do is jump in and hope we swim instead of sink.
Phillip Michaelson (pmichaelson
