Dear Welcome-Week Azalea,
I hope that you enjoyed your Wednesday night out on the Aldrich Park lawn, watching Toy Story 4 with hundreds of other students. That was a good movie.
I hope you enjoyed your Tuesday afternoon having random drinks being thrown at you from directions unknown to you while you were sandwiched between hundreds of sweaty bodies as you were jumping and cheering to the loud bass thumping from the stage during the Aldrich Park After Dark concert.
I hope you enjoyed walking up and down Aldrich Park, signing up for all those clubs during the Anteater Involvement Fair because “clubs are a great way to meet new people who share similar interests”. They’re also a great way to gain leadership skills and network with other people, and you may even make memories.
I hope you enjoyed spending your free hour playing in the Esports Arena during their kickoff event, because opportunities like that are rare. It must’ve been fun having so many people packed into the room that day, crowded around the TVs playing Super Smash Brothers while you were busting your butt on the computer to beat the bots during your practice match on Team Fortress 2.
I hope you enjoyed yourself while you were working up a sweat with those dance classes during Late Night at the Arc. Such a shame you passed up a good opportunity to win a free t-shirt, but then again those lines were pretty long. It must’ve been fun sweating through your clothes while you were trying so hard to belly-dance, but at least you had fun.
I hope you had fun participating in all those activities during Welcome Week, because after Week One hits and instruction begins, the fun runs out and the routine kicks in. Deadlines start to come in thick and fast, professors start to assign more work, and motivation starts to drop. Long lines form at The Hill as people rush to buy and rent their textbooks. LARC enrollment windows start to open up, and before you know it, your first midterm slaps you in the face.
By the end of your fall quarter, you will find yourself sitting in a study lounge or library, staring at your computer screen, typing away at an assignment that you know will be due very soon. Papers will be strewn all over your desk as you do your best to cram and study for your upcoming finals. You know that these grades matter because it determines whether or not you will need to repeat the course and waste even more precious FAFSA money.
You will be cursing yourself internally as you cannot access WebReg yet again due to clogged and overfilled servers full of students who are trying as hard to register for classes as you are.
However, you will be spending so much time with your friends, hall mates, club mates, classmates, and teammates. You will remember the conversations that you had, the dumb stuff that you used to do, the events that you used to hold, the study sessions that you went to, and the struggles that you got through together. College is not all about academics and financial aid; you can also make so many fun memories in college that you will cherish as time goes on! Live your life while you can!