SAWANT: Adjusting to college life is not easy, but it is necessary

As high schoolers living in our parents house, living on their terms for our entire lives so far, we achingly long for the day we get to make our own home on campus and begin to finally live on our own terms. To finally make our own choices and spend our time how we want.

Before you start this college journey, everyone you know tells you the same thing — that you are going to have the best time in college spending your own time, money and energy in any way you want. Finally, it is all up to you. 

I remember the sheer excitement before I moved onto campus. I am a sophomore, which means my entire first year of college was lost to online school. Thanks, COVID-19. When Rutgers announced that campuses and residence halls would open again for the 2021-2022 academic year, I knew it was my time.

Finally, I would get to live out the college student life I would dreamed of living for so long. Taking walks on campus, mastering the bus system, sitting in large lecture halls taking classes you actually were interested in, going out to eat with your friends, staying out late going to coffeehouses and taking charge of your own wellbeing.

Everything anyone had ever told me about everything I would get to do once I arrived on campus was finally about to happen. I was so ready.

So I got my lottery number. I picked a residence hall. I moved in. Finally, here I was. And those first few weeks on campus that I would spend oh so long dreaming about? Absolutely draining.

I was living on my own terms, alright. But it was nothing like I had imagined, not at first.

“Living on your own terms” is a lot more than just hanging out with your friends without telling your parents where you were going or treating yourself to impromptu trips to New York City.

Actually, the bulk of “living on your own terms” is the mundane, keep-yourself-alive stuff.

Making sure you figured out where you were going to get your next meal from. What time you were going to eat it. Dealing with the dent that the cost of food subjects your wallet to. You could not get away with making the small trip to the fridge of your family’s kitchen anymore.

Constantly replenishing supplies like disinfectant wipes, soap and vitamins yourself as soon as they run out. Modifying your bathroom habits because now you share that space with more than 20 other people. Adapting to learning in a classroom again after more than a year online in the comfort of your own room. Learning how to manage your time around the bus system. Accepting the wet fate of a drippy LX. 

Trying to make new friends on a campus with thousands of people, many of whom you would introduce yourself to once and then never see again. Who you would exchange numbers with and then never get around to texting. Everyone else seemed to have groups already too. How is that possible when we would have only been on campus for three days? It is a little lonely at times here, too. 

Accepting your close proximity to the professional world and carrying the weight of figuring out what the heck you want to do with your life. We are still so young after all, it feels like there is still a lot of time to evaluate our choices, but that time goes by quickly. Everyone somehow looks like they have it all figured out too. 

I was instantly humbled.

Those first few weeks here, everything was a process. 

As we face college life coming out of the lockdown era of the pandemic, the adjustment can be especially brutal. Notably to my fellow sophomores — we went directly from being a senior in high school to a sophomore in college on campus. That gap of time we spent at home would have been critical if the pandemic never happened.

Sometimes it feels like I was quite literally plucked from my place and thrust into this completely different lifestyle. But this is what I wanted right?

I did not realize just how much time life outside of school takes until I moved out and I was finally all on my own.

“That is the real world,” my mother told me. And she is right.

But I also see college as a sort of buffer between being home with our families and the actual outside world that we enter once we finish our education and start careers and realize lifelong dreams. College is the peculiar realm between those worlds.

We still have the responsibility of school, work, family and managing our own health and finances, but we also have access to a bunch of free or cheap university resources at the same time. It is easier to create a tight system of friends to support each other in college as opposed to after graduation, too.

If anything, the adjustment we go through when we adapt to college life for the first time is a critical learning experience. We are allowed to make mistakes, learn from them and try again for four years straight. At university, you really do build the life experience that will make adjusting to the actual world after graduating (maybe not totally easier, but) much softer. 

Yet the only way to get the most out of this adventure is to push ourselves to be uncomfortable in that adjustment period. And really any other time during the university experience. Feel the unpleasant feelings. Feel the exhaustion. Feel the uncertainty, the anxiety and validate it.

Because for as many clouds of negative emotions we find ourselves under, we will also find independence, peace, strength and self-confidence when they clear. And it will have all been due to our work. 

The real world really waits for no one, but at college, it waits just a little bit. Take advantage of that.

Everyone loves to tell teenagers before they leave for university how much fun they are about to have, but no one warns them that adjusting to college life is a whole uncomfortable, at times lonely, journey of its own. That it will be hard, but it will be worth it.

You can only come out stronger from the things you go through here, whether it feels like it at the moment. 

So if you felt the same way, or even if you still do, you are not alone. It is normal to miss home, to miss comfort, but it is important to advance in the face of that emotional turmoil. It is hard, but you learn.

Also, in case no one has told you this lately, you are doing a great job right now and everything will be okay.

Rujuta Sawant is a Rutgers Business School sophomore majoring in business analytics and information technology and minoring in political science. Her column, "Sincerely Rue," runs on alternate Mondays.

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