First Years, Transfers, and All the Other New Kids: A Pep Talk From the Eternal Freshman

By Aaron Grubbs on September 11, 2016

I’m now beginning my third year of college and coincidentally I’m also starting fresh at my third campus, the most recent one being very far from home across the Atlantic in Germany. It was never part of the plan when I graduated high school to end up moving around so much but in my time of becoming a professional freshman what I’ve learned is that college is nothing but a series of plans but some fail. Ok, maybe a lot fail. But for the really important ones though, we stay at the library until the sun comes up and close it down with the staff to make sure those plans pull through. We plan to go abroad to a country with people that don’t speak English. We plan to freak out over that a little. Then we plan a lot more so that hopefully we freak out a little less (spoiler alert: it doesn’t work). We plan to join clubs or intramural teams or maybe even greek life (God forbid) and we plan to make lots of friends that way and maybe work on getting a job somewhere so we can stop leaching off our parents so much. We plan our classes for the upcoming semester, spending hours making charts of class times more complex than Grand Central Station’s train schedule. We try to narrow it down using RateMyProfessor.com and the all-important hotness scale. Though some may call it trivial, none can deny that a flaming, red, ghost pepper is certainly quicker to hold your attention than a flaccid, yellow, banana pepper.

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The Beginning Is The Hardest Part

You move away from home, unzipping, and stepping out of the warm insulated tent that is all the comforts you grew up with. The world outside that tent is cold and it’s not always so easy getting a campfire started with new comforts and connections to make you feel all warm and fuzzy (speaking of which, trying to deliberately start a fire makes me wonder how house-fires or forest-fires ever accidentally get started on their own).

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You Might Try To “Rediscover” Things That Remind You Of Home

That road you’d drive down when you were bored that circled the whole town and had just a slightly higher speed limit than the other roads. Blaring your music, you’d sing, not just the words but all the instrumental parts too, as though the people next to you at stop lights couldn’t hear (let alone see) you doing it. The old man in his trademark white t-shirt layered by the always unbuttoned, cuffed sleeves, denim shirt with a worn out baseball cap on top. He was always a darling and sweet to all the baristas and other regulars at the coffee shop.

But these anchors to your sanity aren’t just hollow archetypes to be easily copied and repeated anywhere you settle down. That road was special because it passed dangerously close to not just one, not two but three different ex-girlfriends’ houses and you can’t even guess how many times you must have driven down it headed their way in the past. And the guy from the coffee shop wasn’t just another jolly old man. He shared with you alone secrets that were personal. Such as his admiration for the woman who is at least thirty years old (half his age) and even though he believed he had no chance he’d still hide his cologne in the bathroom so in case she ever came in for a coffee he could go soak himself with it while repeating a mental pep-talk in the mirror before approaching her.

You have to keep in mind that even if you find a cozy, little corner in some organic smelling coffee shop that’s identical to the one you knew before, the most perfect city in the world can still be miserable if you came to it expecting to find all the same comforts that made home, home. Expectations aren’t necessarily a bad thing but they are better sprinkled in with an open mind that’s ready to meet whoever might be in that new space rather than trying to confine it into the parameters that fit your “back home.”

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Developing A Friend Group

This should be easy, right? Being the social butterfly you were back home you never had a problem meeting people or making friends. But does anyone ever really remember when or how they became so close with their best friend? I don’t. Which is what makes doing it again so difficult. In every other case these things just seemed to happen one day so you start to worry when it doesn’t keep happening in this new place. You don’t always realize back home just how often common connections and mutual friends were actually the building blocks for creating new friendships. And suddenly you’ve found yourself in need of a new structure but you’ve don’t have any legos. Your never-ending internal monologue begins asking questions: “Is it just this town? The people? Is it me?” And then you find yourself in the third hour of a Buzzfeed YouTube marathon ranging from topics like “The Science of Kissing” to “10 Things Everyone Should Do in College” and you realize the bar has been set super high and you are SO NOT READY but SO stoked to be ready at the same time. If only you could get yourself out from behind this computer screen and go meet someone to do all these awesome things with!

In A Town Full Of New, Bring In Some You

If you’re really just feeling helpless, fill your time with some activities that made you happy back home. The more active the better too, because being outdoors and exercising is proven to make you happier. My “back home” included this abandoned Air Force jet fuel depot I always used to go to with friends. Of course, we weren’t supposed to be there but the Air Force didn’t seem too worried about it (if only the LHPD had gotten that memo). Part of the allure of the place was a morbid collection of polaroids once strewn around the floor of a back room in the main warehouse. One photo in particular that seemed exceptionally odd to have been left behind was one that supposedly depicted a burnt corpse. Captioned in the white borders with black sharpie were the words, “The encircled area above contains the charred victim’s remains.” What was even more troubling was that virtually the entire image had been encircled and you couldn’t tell what was supposed to be burnt human and what was just burnt metal debris. Probably the driver of a truck carrying jet fuel that blew up, but we were never sure what exactly happened.

Secretly though, I always hoped something genuinely creepy would happen and we would get a haunting; some distinctly rattled chains or footsteps coming from the attic. And as cheesy as this may sound we all know we’d crap our pants if an unknown being suddenly showed up in the darkness cloaked in a white bed sheet (kind of makes you shiver at the thought of what the 1950s must have been like around here).

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If there’s anything one can always find anywhere they travel, it’s a Mcdonalds and abandoned buildings. So I continued my search for spooky vacant houses and old shut down psych wards when I first arrived at FSU. I looked at photographer blogs like Abandoned Tallahassee which led me to the old Tallahassee Commercial “Airport,” which was really more like something crossed between a podunk country store and a shitty, roadside motel’s office building. Then a friend of mine told me about this creepy old plantation mansion that had been left vacant for years. She showed me pictures and said she had just gone there last summer so, with high hopes, I decided to turn the exploration into a first date. However on the drive there the frames of my glasses dismantled themselves but thankfully I had my prescription sunglasses as backup. Only problem, it was well after sundown. So when we get to the already pitch black dark field where the mansion is I could hardly see ten feet in front of me. But it wouldn’t have mattered because it wasn’t until we were standing in what used to be the living room of the mansion that I realized it had been torn down months ago.

Don’t Give Up Hope Yet. Remember, Some Plans Fail…

So it’s at this point that the whole idea of moving away is sounding pretty dismal, right? Don’t worry, it always gets better. Sometimes you just have to stop trying quite so damn hard. Well I stopped looking for a little while and focused on school and just meeting people like the cute girl with dreads that sings reggae and wears that nice sweater, which I totally used as the subject of an opening compliment to excuse my random chatting with her. Inside of a week of knowing each other she was already showing me a cool abandoned restaurant that had burned down which perhaps should have thrown up red flags in the stranger danger department that a girl I just met was taking me to her secret abandoned building. But whatever, I rolled with it. And just like that I had finally found a kick-ass urban exploring partner.

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That kind of interaction and introduction couldn’t have been planned; it had to happen on its own. It was a total accident that we both took the same route that day and ran into each other and ended up becoming such great friends. I think it’s a testament that even in a world of deadlines and structure and plans we’ve got to break down those walls occasionally and allow a little spontaneity. Sometimes we have to fail. So bring on the mistakes because at the point of either tantalizing failure or even just slightly embarrassing trip-up you see a person’s determination and humility during their most vulnerable state. And hopefully you end up displaying high concentrations of both these characteristics because that’s what you’re going to need to make it through this first year in a new place. There are some lines from a favorite movie of mine that say, “There are three stages of finding friends in college. The first is desperation, the second is panic, the third is fate and you wind up at the same table together somehow and your real life begins” (About Alex, 2014).

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