Initially when I sat to pen this column, my plan was to elucidate on all of the things I wish I had done while at this glorious university. But, as I sit alone in my house on a Friday night for the first time in a long time, on my second to last weekend in Starkville, a more valuable piece of advice rises to my mind. Whatever happens during your four years here at Mississippi State University, you’re going to be ok.
I could spend the next couple paragraphs explaining all my personal what-ifs and wish-I-hads, but I wouldn’t want to impose my wishes on to you. I want you to figure out your hopes for yourself.
If you are anything like I was at 18, you’ve spent the last year of your life daydreaming about ‘college,’ an elusive idea you’ve made up in your head and quixotic images provided by B-list Hollywood movies where everyone is at house parties with red solo cups and bad ‘90s music humming in the background. You have likely spent the last two months obsessively garnering the necessary sorority recs and purchasing the perfect water party dresses, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, I want someone to tell you that when you don’t get the sorority you wanted, it’s going to be ok. And when frat parties aren’t quite the glittering Gatsby affair you imagined them, college is still going to be ok.
Because what the college kids’ Facebook photo albums don’t tell you about is all the nights they spent alone in their dorm room binge-watching “The Office,” and eating Perry pizza from a styrofoam to-go container. And if your first couple months of college are lonely, it’s going to be ok. A lot of my best friends in college weren’t made until the end of my freshman year and on into sophomore year. Some of you reading this might make your best friends the first week of school — my roommates did — but for others, it might take you just a few more months or years, and that’s ok.
Because here’s what they don’t tell you about college. It’s more than books and date parties and the perfect Moleskine planner, it’s about learning how to live life on your own. It’s about learning to be you.
Because at the end of the day you are the person you have to live with 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. You have to be ok with your own failures. You have to be proud of what you do accomplish, and you have to be ok when other people are chosen over you — because honestly this university can’t have 20,000 Roadrunners, it just can’t. But, what is important, is that when you are selected, you give it your best. You can only accomplish the opportunities life presents you. So, please, for yourself, rock those opportunities.
However, if you would like a few bits of advice from a graduating senior please keep reading — after four years here I believe I have just a few pointers to give.
When you go to sign up for classes, please, for me, branch out. Do not sign up for modern U.S. history just because all of your friends did — unless you are actually a JFK enthusiast, they’re out there; I live with one.
MSU has a plethora of fascinating classes, like History of Pop Culture or History of Tudor and Stuart England. There are literature classes on everything from Jane Austen to C.S. Lewis. There are classes on religion and how it pertains to the environment or even to culture. The next four years are about preparing you to embrace the world — which starts with a broadened mind.
The important thing is that you put yourself out there. Join clubs, try out for things (even if you think you will never make it in a million years) and hang out with people who are different than you.
On the sunny days that illuminate campus, spend some time under the Bakery tree when it’s in bloom, and know that while school is the most important aspect of your time here at MSU, sometimes your friends must come first. So when your friend comes to you in tears, put down the 10-page paper — coffee was invented for emotional all-nighters.
I didn’t set out to write this article to be profound. Honestly, I may have intended a few superfluous sentences throughout, but what I am intentional about is that no matter what happens, give college a chance, because I think four years from now you’re going to look back and realize in the end it was all ok — actually, it was better than ok.
