Lessons Learned
Laura Breslin
Issue date: 8/20/05 Section: opinion
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Versus Magazine Online [Image based format]
College is a great opportunity to reinvent yourself. New faces, new places, you are both a blank slate and the pen to define yourself. Like all its other forms, the power to create a new persona can be intoxicating. If you were always on the social fringe in high school, it is entirely possible to leave for college and think your social status will change in a university setting. The embarrassing moments tainting the high school years will most likely not carry over. You are free to embark on the next chapter of your life, composing the symphony of your life as you choose on your clear tableau rosa.
As a freshman at Vanderbilt, it is far too easy to lose yourself in all things social and forget what matters to you. Fitting in challenges every one, and the presence of sororities and fraternities on campus only serve as another source of unnecessary social pressure. As you leave behind friends you may very well have had since childhood, friendships freshman year are often made for less-than-noble reasons and build on illusions of true identity. The oft-repeated mantra of "just be yourself and they will like you" doesn't seem as applicable as it once did as you long for the friendships of the high school years.
If you make a friend for superficial reasons, the friendship itself will be superficial. Your countless beer pong partners may catch your ping-pong ball, but they will not be there to catch you when you fall. Friendships built on the illusion of who you really are will fall apart just as castles built in sand wash away. No year will be as trying in an extra-academic sense as your freshman year, and you will need good friends this year. Be yourself, because if they don't like you for who you really are, are they really your friends?
As a slightly older - and wiser - senior and sorority girl, I can tell you that being any one other than yourself will neither get you a bid in any house, nor make you friends you want to keep. The same holds true for all the frat-bound boys, because while the girls endure brief periods of "recruitment", freshman boys are subject to an entire semester of meeting brothers and rushing. Life has a funny way of working itself out, and while the house you commit yourself to as a freshman may not have been the house you foresaw yourself in, it will be the house you were intended to be in.