First College Semester
In one of the orientation events at NYU this August, we were invited to write letters to ourselves that we’d read again at the end of the semester. As I scanned mine last week, a to-do list jumped out at me:
Go to class.
Do new shit.
I’m pretty sure I copied the list from an AskReddit college advice thread -it seemed pretty good advice at the time- and it’s as good a place as any to start reflecting on my first college semester. I want this essay to do two things. I want to look back on my first semester, and I want to write the essay I wish I’d read during the summer, something of a here’s-what-to-expect.
I managed to achieve perfect attendance for my four classes this semester, so at least I fulfilled the first requirement I set myself way back in the summer (it feels like forever ago). I got the impression, both during college and beforehand, that it’s exceedingly rare to make it to all your college lectures. (Case in point: after tweeting about full attendance, one reply to me simply stated “TEACH ME YOUR WAYS.”) From what I can tell, I was mistaken in originally thinking this was something uniquely Irish — when I asked other NYU students, no other student reported going to all of their classes.
I found it interesting that, over lunch the day before my semester finals started, a friend outside NYU expressed surprise that I considered full attendance to be something of an achievement. You’re a studious guy, he said — you do the coursework, and you’re not going to skip classes to hang out with your friends. It’s true that I’m not that kind of guy, but I was also lucky that forces outside my control (sickness, inclement weather) didn’t affect me. I doubt you can have full attendance without both of the above.
A decent follow-up question here would be how important I think perfect attendance in college is. Obviously, I thought it was during the semester, since I kept going to class, but what do I think in hindsight? Well, firstly, I think it’s worth noting that for my classes, attendance was usually worth a percentage of my grade — 10% in one case, 15% in another, and 20% in my New York literature seminar. Often, attendance and class participation would be linked, and in more than one class, sustained absence was grounds for failing the class. To an extent, so, it doesn’t really matter what I think about whether attendance is important — NYU takes it seriously.
Even so, I don’t think I could imagine a scenario where I think it’d be better to skip class. While I was in high school, I was constantly seeking opportunities to study at home. There are a couple differences between high school and college, obviously — college classes are much more concentrated (you have less class time to cover a larger amount of more complex coursework) and also set in longer blocks: my high school classes were 40 minutes long, where it was sometimes difficult to get a large chunk of meaningful work done. My lectures in college were all 75 minutes, and so I felt I got a lot more meaningful work done in college than high school.
In primary school, I was told that if you learn something incorrectly the first time, such as a spelling error, it takes 27 repetitions for the human brain to unlearn the error and learn the correction. I would extend this factoid to college and say that it’s harder to catch up on the material covered in a college lecture than it is to go along to the lecture. Whenever I was tempted to skip a lecture, I reminded myself that I was probably going to have to spend 1.5x or 2x the time covering the concepts sometime else — why not stick to my timetable in the first place?
The temptation to skip lectures is a good way of segueing into the second half of the list I started this essay with. Admittedly, it’s hard to know whether I’ve been successful in ‘doing new shit,’ but there are a couple of interesting points that seem to point to a positive outcome.
I learned very quickly that life is full of opportunity costs; college life especially so. I learned of the term ‘opportunity cost’ in high school economics first, but it’s a widely-applicable principle. If I have $10 to spend on either a CD or a book, and I choose the CD, the book is said to be my ‘opportunity cost’ — what I had to do without in order to buy what I did. It’s also referred to as the cost of the next best alternative. Since time, like money, is a finite resource, I can have opportunity costs there, too — time spent doing laundry is time spent not doing anything else. The concept of opportunity cost is why so many productivity hacktivists encourage you to read or study on your morning commute — they advocate reclaiming wasted time (doing nothing on the subway) to be used productively.
College experience is built of two things: what happens in college, and your life outside college. I made a huge effort to have a life that existed outside of NYU, and I think it was definitely worth it. NYC certainly lends itself to this effort, and I think this definitely helped me reach my perhaps ill-defined goal of “doing new shit.” Without going through my calendar with a toothpick, I think I caught 3 shows, met a dozen or so friends who were passing through NYC, and had countless experiences that, while they may not be NYC-specific, are certainly large city- or perhaps America-specific.
It should seem obvious to anybody who’s been in college (or even anybody who has the potential to do interesting things, especially at night) that sleep is the ultimate opportunity cost. Early in September, a friend of mine was playing a concert in 54 Below, a charmingly intimate cabaret ‘supper club’ in Midtown. The concert was slated to start at 21:30 on a Sunday night. I saw Anthony Rapp do some of my favorite tunes (doing particularly good renditions of Losing My Religion and Falling Slowly) and got home just after 1am on Monday morning, acutely aware that I had a 9:30 Spanish lecture in a couple hours. (It’s worth noting here that I’m pretty wimpish when it comes to sleep, and I’m a zombie for the day if I get less than 7 hours sleep on any given night.) There was a trade-off involved in going to that concert (I was tired all next day) but it was worth it, and college is a series of these kinds of trade-offs.
This idea of opportunity cost was probably the biggest thing I didn’t know going into college, even though in retrospect it seems pretty obvious. I feel like living in Manhattan does nothing to help this problem (not that it’s a problem — it’s a challenge), since the city is full of amazing events and places to hang out. Anthony Rapp doesn’t do several concerts a year in Syracuse, after all. (Syracuse University in upstate NY was the first US college I was accepted into — I chose NYU in part because NYC struck me as a more exciting place to spend 4 years, although Syracuse does get an honorable mention for being the snowiest city in the contiguous United States.)
When making conversation with people, I often remark on the fact that I moved out of my parent’s house for the first time AND began living in Manhattan in one step, both of which are fairly big changes in and of themselves. In hindsight, I don’t actually think it’s as big a move as I thought. More often than not, I was reminded how, even in New York, a lot of what I did could have been done anywhere. I was balancing a budget, doing laundry, getting lost, using public transport, going to class, studying, spending time with friends. None of these are NYC-specific in and of themselves, although having Manhattan as a backdrop certainly does change them.
This is one of the things I wish I’d known — college in NYC is a heady experience but at the end of the day, college is college. The tasks and pastimes mentioned above are the same whether I’m in NYU, Syracuse, or Trinity College Dublin.
Overall, I had an absolute blast during my first semester of college. My anxieties over the summer of being the friendless Irish kid proved themselves to be ungrounded and living on your own provides you with an indescribable sense of joy that stems from the autonomy, and studying what you’re interested in (as opposed to what your high school curriculum dictates) renews your love of learning like nothing else.
As I write this, it’s December 17, and I’m somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland flying home for winter break. The deadlines for regular applications for US colleges is approaching, with most of them falling on or around New Year’s Day. I’m probably going to spend a lot of this break thinking about where I was a year ago and how different I am now. I’m incredibly happy with how the last 12 months have turned out. Bring on next semester, next year, and the next batch of adventures. My advice for next year’s freshmen? Go to class. Do new shit.
