Top 10 Things I Miss in First Year – The Cavalier Daily

Halfway through the fall semester of my fourth year, I can’t help but remember some of the highlights of the first year. Here are 10 things I grieve every day – but fortunately, the grieving period is pretty fleeting.

1. Find your way to French class using Google Maps

On the first day of my freshman year, my first class was in Nau Hall. I had no idea where this mysterious Nau Hall was, so the world was mine and Google Maps. I gave myself no less than an hour to make the 20-minute walk from New Dorms, and when I made it to my French class with over 30 minutes to spare, I truly felt like I had accomplished something. Relying on GPS to get to class was no easy task, but I survived—and it wasn’t until months later that I learned that I was taking the most inconvenient routes to almost every location around Grounds.

2. Getting locked out of my dorm room

I can still imagine the horrific sight of my dorm door closed as I stood in the hallway at 3 a.m. with no keys and no phone. With no keys and no phone, my options were slim. I had to wait in the hallway for 30 minutes for someone to show up and ask to call maintenance on their phone. Staring at the hallway wall without my phone made me really think about the meaning of life – and why I’ll never leave my room without my phone again.

3. Saying that I am still “undecided” about my major

Telling people that I still hadn’t decided on a major was fun and liberating. I changed my mind daily and it was exhilarating to imagine the possibilities and take on a different personality with each different major I considered. I wrote a single discussion post for my philosophy class and then I had a breakthrough – am I Albert Camus? I was a philosophy major at the time, and when that dream fell through, when my first paper on numerical identity didn’t blow my TA’s socks off, I thought – maybe I should try psychology?

4. Fire alarms in the dorm – and if you’re lucky, a real dorm fire

I really miss waking up in the middle of the night to a fire alarm in my dorm. I always loved the quick thinking required – first figuring out what the noise was, then how I would muster the strength to drag myself out of bed, and finally walking down the stairs from the sixth floor. You got to see people you didn’t even know lived in your building and there were a lot of fun outfits to see. Sometimes a fire truck even showed up. The best part? Fire alarms always went off at the most opportune times, like the night before my final exam.

5. The walk down the hallway to my dorm after the shower

As a proud resident of Balz-Dobie, I was allowed to share a shared bathroom with an entire hallway and return to my room in just my robe – how could I be so lucky? I miss the blast of ice-cold air that hits me in the hallway after a hot shower. I also miss running into people on the way back to the room. You don’t have to make lunch plans with the people who live down your hall – you can just chat while you’re dripping wet, wearing shower shoes, and only carrying a towel.

6. Having so much time left to “experience” everything.

I still don’t know what it means to have a “real college experience,” but that phrase is used so frequently that I once assumed I’d figure out what it meant by fourth year. The four years ahead of me served as the perfect justification and explanation for almost every problem I faced. Want to stay home and watch a movie on a Friday night? Luckily, I have endless weekends ahead of me where I can go out. Now I’m a fourth-year student who still hasn’t found the definition of the “true college experience” and may be running out of Friday nights to reach a conclusion.

7. Constantly introducing yourself

Name, pronouns, hometown, planned major—I finally got the chatter under control. I could rattle off these introductions in my sleep and knew how to respond as if everyone’s answer was the most interesting thing I’d heard that day – even though they told me they were pre-med majors in biology. Exciting! The constant self-promotion was exhausting, but I would do it all day if it meant avoiding revealing a fun fact about myself.

8. I thought fourth graders were so wise

I remember thinking fourth graders were much older and fitter than me. I marveled at the fourth graders in my classes and wondered if I, too, would ever be as wise and knowledgeable. It’s almost disappointing to realize that fourth graders were never actually the mythical creatures I imagined them to be – if I’m a fourth grader now, there’s certainly a hole in that logic. Oh, to be young and naive again.

9. Squeezing everything I own into half of a tiny space

Ugh, I miss the creativity needed to effectively store things under my bed and in every available inch of space on my side of the room. Plastic containers, rolling carts, and door organizers – I had it all. You might think that this experience encouraged me to be a minimalist, but I think it had the opposite effect. Why should you learn to pack as little as possible when you can instead subject both yourself and your parents to the most stressful moving in and out possible?

10. Everything – but also nothing at all

It’s my fourth year and I’m nostalgic. I see first graders running around the grounds and long for the same feeling of freshness and excitement that I can feel in them. Then I think back to the feeling of waking up in my dorm room on a chilly morning and going to classes I really didn’t like, and I immediately feel sick – it’s really a visceral reaction. But just as quickly as I ran out of breath thinking about the horrors of first year, my thoughts wander back to my first-grade self and I feel sentimental. I’m forever stuck between these two alternating extremes.