Growing up?

College is a time for maturation. During these years, we students are expected to find ourselves, organize our lives and figure what the future will hold.

However, while we search for answers to these imperative questions, we'll get drunk, make mistakes and wake up on couches we don't remember falling asleep on.

Now, wait a minute. Doesn't this directly contradict the whole maturation thing? Partying three nights a week, battling Sunday morning headaches, and putting off that essay due on Monday until 2 a.m. the night before does not seem to be the best way to go about growing up.

Since walking onto beloved South Campus slightly over a year ago as a naive freshman, I've experienced more in my eighteenth year than I did in the first seventeen combined.

There were the late-night rushes to the hospital for friends who took one too many shots of Jack Daniels to relationships, the R.A invaded dorm room parties, and the staggered Main Street odysseys to Sal's or Uhots.

And let's not forget those relationships that slowly and painfully faded away. In a world consumed, every weekend, by all too attractive students crowding a frat basement, dressed with intention of spending the night somewhere other than their dorm room, a healthy connection with a significant other is harder to maintain than a 4.0 GPA.

After a year of these memories, I feel tougher for the taking. Without fighting through these rounds, right hooking my way out of countless corners, how would I be able to handle what comes after all of this? If college is too much for me, what the hell am I going to do when real life rolls around?

Unfortunately, this year has replayed many of those aforementioned recollections, and I somehow still feel unequipped to handle it.

What's going on here? Shouldn't I feel up to these challenges? Why do I still feel trapped between expensive books and costly liquor? Did I not just declare myself a tougher college model?

The truth of the matter is that this whole experience is not a series of rounds, or bouts, or obstacles. This whole thing is one sloppy, silly, over-dramatic, over-serious, intellectual, blurry, stoned train wreck of an event.

We come out of high school as products of a structured, state mandated society. College rips these structured seams apart, opening our eyes to new ways of teaching and new ways of thinking.

In high school, the basic rule of thumb was that the teacher gave out assignments, which were mostly boring and rarely helpful. Said instructors would teach the material the state required that they teach, allowing the students to finish the homework during class. But doing homework in class wasn't a big deal, as long as you weren't sleeping.

In college, teachers assign what they want, most of them expecting class participation and original opinions formed from reading the material. Are they insane? These guys don't care about losing their job because of failing students.

On the other side of the spectrum are social relationships. What changes between high school and college in terms of friendship?

First of all, friends from high school go their own direction to their respective colleges, meeting new groups of people. Those kids you spent nearly every day with in class, high-fiving in the halls and cracking Chappelle's Show or Anchorman jokes, now serve as some sort of past life we will no longer be able to go back to.

Sure, there's the summer and the winter, but all these holidays serve to do is remind you of what once was; a taste of something lost.

New friends are made, new memories burnt into your skull. Eventually, those old friends become exactly that: old friends.

But by starting all over again, forming new relationships and dealing with the same drama that many hoped would disappear with the eight-period days and cafeteria lunches, we the students must find a way to burn our own path while dealing with the likes of sexual attraction, drugs, and idealistic teaching, along with all of this high school-esque bullsh*t. How does this help to mature students, only years away from spouses and children and mortgages and office politics?

At the end of the day, all of this repetition and all of these mistakes (promised to be remade again and again) are something to learn from. While it may take the full four years, or more, to finally mature and feel ready for real life, enjoy the nights because there'll be plenty...right now, at least.