How to get over not having a good college experience?
I’m going into my last year of college and I kinda felt like I did college wrong. Like, my grades are good but everything else about college I failed at. Like socially and stuff, after 4 years I barely know anybody. I commuted(to avoid debt, and did so successfully) so maybe that’s part of my problem.
But I feel college was supposed to be special time in your life and to me it has been indifferent. :/Thoughts?
You may just be a bit more on the introverted side of the spectrum and that’s normal. There are social expectations that we should “have lots of friends” and that college is a time to meet and hang out with people and do crazy stuff to think back on when we are in our 40s. I think those sentiments were created a few generations back when the cost of college wasn’t necessarily a concern. But even you, who managed to do it so far without debt, had to think about the cost as a big factor and it impacted how you attended. Surprise! A bunch of young adults trying to get an education while being stressed about a potentially life-altering amount of debt and an uncertain future aren’t really in the best place to be social and have fun. My point is don’t blame yourself; the system is kind of fucked right now.
If you get your degree that’s great, you’ll have access to more doors in life and hopefully that means more free time to devote to things you already know you like and maybe some stuff you’ve yet to find out you like. If you feel like you want more friends, there are social clubs, discord servers, and meetups in towns/cities you can look into to find folks who are more or less aligned with your interests rather than your education level. There is still a lot about life you’ve yet to see and I think a not-so-great college experience won’t be something you think about even a year after graduation.
Man thanks for the reminder, What influnced my choices was cost and bachelor’s doesn’t have as much strength in the job market it once has. If a more free and less stressful comes at a cost a social life early one so be it. Older me will hopefully appreciate the foresight. I need to put more work in cultivating a more full social life.
Excellent points, and I’ll just add my own 2 cents.
I wouldn’t stress. I went to Weber State in Ogden, Utah, and its really more of a commuter school. Plenty of people living off campus and working full-time. I didn’t do a lot of parties or anything, but I had some good friends.
If you are happy, don’t worry about it. If you know a few people and that’s all you need, you’re good. Besides, there is plenty more of life where you can have a funner time.
I didn’t really start what I would call the ‘best part’ of my life till I met my wife at 27. I’m 34 and honestly enjoying it more than I did my 20’s
I didn’t make any friends in college. It was a strange place to learn that I was an introvert. Years later I went to law school and had a much better experience. There’s just something about suffering together that builds closer bonds.
If your grades are good and you enjoy your major, could I suggest becoming a tutor/teaching assistant for a class or professor you liked? It would give you a way to interact with people in your major that might even be in your other classes (whether that’s other TAs or the students you’re teaching), you’d get something for your resume, a professor to use as a job reference, and you should even get paid!
I can relate but lack of socializing in college didn’t bother me (I’m an introvert). Didn’t make any friends during undergrad and made some friends during my grad program that I still talk to but most of my friends are from high school.
Everyone’s college experience is different and just because it didn’t check certain boxes (unless they’re important to YOU), that doesn’t mean you failed. I think it’s put out there to be this special time in your life but “special” is subjective.
For me the best part about college was a (game development) club I was heavily involved in. I met a lot of good people and had good experiences. I still speak with some of the people from that and do some activities with them. This is not exclusively a college experience though. You can do this later, whether that’s with coworkers or other people. There are tools out there to find people with similar interests, for example D&D is a good one.
College forces you to interact with people with similar experiences and interests, which is why it’s conducive to this, but it isn’t the only place it happens. You’ll be fine regardless. It sounds like you just need to get past the stage of meeting new people, which is the hardest part.
Write down as much detail as you can about what you did wrong so that you don’t repeat the mistakes in the future.
Take what you wrote here about exactly and precisely you missed in college, and expand it to 10 pages.
Your overall goal is to cover in as much depth these topics:
Exactly what happened. The bare facts. “I went to college starting X date. I took XYZ classes. I lived X place. The weather was X.” etc etc.
What role your decisions played in that story. “I chose to get a bike, and that caused XYZ. When faced with decision A1 vs A2 I decided A2 because I thought blah blah. That resulted in X.” etc
What changes to behavior you can make going forward, to avoid the worst pitfalls in the previous experience
The only way to get over any negative life experience is to fully suck the well dry in terms of lessons learned. Any problem you encounter contains potential lessons that can help you avoid that same problem in the future. Life is long. As long as negative experiences are processed into wisdom, it works out to your benefit in the end.
But you have to perform the extraction. Performing the extraction means doing the writing. A lot of writing. As much as you can really. The more details you scrape out in your written exploration, the more completely the extraction is done.
When the experience has been totally drained of potential lessons — when you’ve articulated them all — you will be (and most importantly you will feel) over it.
That’s how you get over a mistake in life. It never goes away. It will always be in your past. But if process it, it shines as a source of good in your past, becomes something you’re proud of, because now the event consists of the fused union of the event and the lessons you learned, and those lessons are valuable enough to make it worth it.
Until you do that, you’ve got all event and no lessons, and it will feel shameful and dark in your memory.
COVID-19 really fucked with the college experience. Add to that commuting and you basically skipped the “away from home and independent for the first time experience” as well as the “captive audience” life of thousands of people your own age looking to make friends and have fun.
That said, yesterday is gone so what about tomorrow? Do you plan to move to a different city for your new career? That could be very exciting.
Serious question: are you autistic? I didn’t know I was at the time but I too went through university without ever making hardly any friends. Those people I did interact with were only out of necessity like for group projects. I haven’t kept in touch with any of them, and I did hardly any extra curriculars during that time. I graduated in 2019. Then in 2022 I found out I might be autistic and ended up getting diagnosed as such.
I don’t think so. There might be the possibility but pretty sure, I’m not. I always struggled with being venerable with ppl and making connections with ppl, so I’m not sure if that’s a sign of autism but I kinda feel neurotypical. Might just have a strong case of avoidant personality disorder tho.
Yeah it’s a spectrum. I never thought of myself as autistic until I watched a particular YouTube video where a guy describes what autism looked like for him and it was so utterly different from what I understood autism to be. (Link)
Personally I think of myself being more on the Aspergers end of the spectrum although they don’t diagnose people with that anymore. For me it’s a lot about getting stuck into a routine and not wanting to change the way I do things, combined with some amount of sensory overload that I had never really associated with my own neurodivergence, and a decent amount of missing certain social cues.
So speaking from experience and a background in education, the most important thing you'll get from uni is yourself. Or more specifically, how you see yourself. Uni (college for you US folk) lets us extend our formative phase and define how we see ourselves and what we'll put out into the world going forward.
So my advice is go easy on yourself, everyone's experience is different and no one's is right or wrong. You mention a lot of great things you did, heading towards graduation with good grades and little/no debt is a huge success, sounds like you're practical, hard-working and smart. Maybe you didn't have the wild ragers, hookups, BFFs that we see in media, but I'd imagine you did have some good social experiences, casual friends, good conversations (even in classes) and the sort of interactions that help you build better relationships later on in life.
Take a deep breath, focus on the positive, which there is plenty even in your short post, and remember you've got a whole exciting life ahead of you, plenty of time for adventures, friendships/relationships, and you've put yourself in a great position to find those.
And I apologize if this sounds preachy or therapisty (and reading comments, it's not far from what others have said too), but I'm basically writing a letter to 22yo me, and at 38 now, trust me, life has been awesome after uni, so congrats on your hard work, power through to the end of the year, and take some time to feel proud of who you are and have become.
I did the same thing in university. I ate, slept (usually), avoided unnecessary expenses, and focused on my grades. One day I woke up with a degree. Then another.
Then I got a job, where I largely didn’t socialize and just focused on doing good work, and avoiding unnecessary expenses. Then I immigrated to another country, and kept the same habits. Then I started a company, again with the same habits.
One of the valuable things in this world is the ability to focus. There is nothing wrong with you.
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
My nature is to prioritize knowledge over happiness. That being said, I am also relatively happy right now, and was then too.
There was the whole part in the middle where I immigrated to a new country. That was properly hard. I wasn’t particularly happy during the first half decade of that.
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