Surviving College.

Ah, university years.

The amusing answers on how one has spent college days are typically getting drunk, getting laid, and getting high, and maybe get a diploma in the process.

So how did I spend mine? Let's just say I was half stick-in-the-mud and half-wild child. The wild child part is when I almost didn’t get honors because I spent Wednesdays at Where Else, Thursdays at Flute, and Fridays at Wasabi. Of course, the bars would only be familiar if you were a 2000 something college student.

I think I was a fairly conscientious student. I attended lectures, but I also stealthily filtered out some of the more boring ones and would come crashing back to earth whenever a classmate nudged me. I’ve had vanilla (generic) professors, mind-boggling professors, and sardonic professors. I’ve had professors who gave religion a bad name and goaded us to say otherwise, and professors who were so obviously learned and academic that my eyes just glazed over whenever they lectured. I didn’t understand a thing.

I have had classmates tallying how many times my professor would say “Oo” or “Uhm” after a sentence. It reached up to 40 in about half an hour. I also remember the professor in my freshman year who uttered with complete sanguinity, “If you’re bad, I’m badder!” I don’t know if he was trying to be cute or just plain lost.

In the process, I have realized that college days brought confusion and enlightenment. Confusion on the amount of information one has to absorb in a given day. Enlightenment on the amount of information one has to absorb in a given day. It just depends on which side of the coin prevails. Then it became a realization that the matters discussed during high school provided me with the basic tools to survive, but it’s only scratching the surface. On a more competitive level, one has to work hard to prove his intellectual capabilities, or at the very least, his sanity.

Then there’s the never-ending battle with extra-curricular activities. Debate, newspaper, outreach programs, student council, and the list becomes endless. The diversion they bring is tantamount to the time you devote on each one. However, there are those who would have built a career on extra-curricular activities, and landed lucrative job opportunities on the strength of their extra-curriculars.

But like everything else, college is one big clique of complexities. There’s the varsity and pep squad, the commercial models, the geeks, the nerds, the pseudo-intellectuals, the Counter-Strike kids, the writers and artists, and everything else in between. You form groups and maybe realize that you are not too alien after all. That people with seemingly variant personalities could be friends and find the thread of commonality among them.

In the end, you go to college four or five years, hoping to learn from the best and apply everything once you are slapped with documents on a desk job. Only to find out in the end, that work environment is college all over again.

Then you start with the basics.