A Letter to my Brother as he Enters College
Dear Riley,
Congratulations on graduating high school! It’s been an honor to watch you grow and mature into a full fledged adult in recent years.
Now you’re headed off to the University of Oregon in the fall (depending on what coronavirus has to say, of course), so it’s time for me to write another letter to you like the one I wrote for your high school.
As with all advice, take what works and discard what doesn’t resonate. You’re a different person than me, even if we share the same genetics, so what worked for me in university may not work for you.
That said, I do think there are certain learnings I can share that will be helpful for you and anyone else embarking on this exciting new journey. So here I am sharing them:
Sample Everything ( Again)
Find Your Freshman Tribe First
Study Abroad
Major in Passion, Minor in Career
Nobody Cares About College After College
Sample Everything (Again)
In my last letter, I exhorted you to sample everything available to you in high school, given all the extra curricular resources at ones disposal. In college, this is even more true.
There are teams and clubs and interest groups and on-campus establishments and endowments and grants and SO MANY different varieties of things to try in college.
As I mentioned before, nothing like this exists in the post-graduate world. At best you’d have dedicated fans running their own club on weekday nights— but on campus there are actual institutions and budgets behind such interests. There will never be a lower bar to trying weird new things as there is now.
For example, here is a list of classes and clubs I tried during college: aerial silks, brazilian jiu jitsu, roller hockey, rugby, partner dance, knitting, satirical newspaper writing, the ski and snowboard club, the on campus food co-operative, wilderness guiding, and even playing Quidditch. And all of these things were funded in some way by the university!
Depending on your major, college likely has even more free time than high school due to the class schedule, so there’s all the more time to fill up with fun things of your choosing. Who knows, it may spark a lifelong hobby or interest — or it will just be that fun thing you tried once and can share as a story down the line. Either way, now’s the time to do so.
Find Your Freshman Tribe First
You’re about to be thrown in amongst thousands of people your own age from all across the country, most of whom are leaving behind the majority of their social network and friends. It’s a free for all to determine who is going to hang out with who and what new friendships will emerge.
Usually this happens during the first semester of freshman year, and ossifies into a surprisingly resilient social network for the rest of those four years.
Every single person I stay in touch with from college are people I met during first semester freshman year.
There’s something about surviving that crucible together (plus the sheer number of minutes spent together in a dorm or classes) that creates an incredibly strong bond. As such, it’s important to choose that group carefully.
Exercise whatever scant control you have over your housing situation to try and be placed with dorm mates you enjoy. If you don’t like them, you’ll have to venture out farther to find replacement friends.
Spend your first semester exploring the interest groups you have the most interest in, as that is where you are most likely to find like minded friends.
Sidenote: the Greek System
I recommend you do NOT rush a fraternity your first semester freshman year.
If you do, those will be your friends, and it will be very hard to disentangle yourself from that group for the rest of the four years. Instead, create a social network of your own first, and then if you desire to do so, sample what Greek life has to offer in second semester, year, or beyond.
I only got to Greek life in earnest in my senior year, and I’m glad I did. Never again will there be as many resources pooled into making sure you spend consistent time with the same wider group of people as in Greek life.
Hangouts are required (not optional as they are with normal friends) and you have already paid money that goes towards said hangouts. Plus, their social exchanges and group trips resemble prom night’s magic or that of a weekend cabin trip, simply dialed up to 11.
That said, the decision is yours. Just don’t do it first thing :).
Study Abroad
I highly recommend leveraging your university’s study abroad program.
My postgraduate identity was shaped far more by my undergraduate time studying abroad than the time spent stateside.
You can refer to my Matador Network writings for all the gifts that study abroad provides. It started my writing habit, first as a travel blog, then as a means of self inquiry, and now here as a message here to you.
There are many trite sayings around how travelers read the whole book of life while sedentary folks read only a single page, bla bla bla. The benefit for me was seeing other people and cultures, and realizing that my own people and culture wasn’t as static as I had thought it to be.
You gain a better sense for who you are, versus what your culture told you to be, and the true diversity of humanity out there.
It may even be cheaper and easier than your alma mater, too. Due to the perverse incentives of the modern American undergraduate system, chances are even with a third party study aboard program you’ll likely pay less abroad than you do while at the university. And depending on your program, the schoolwork may be easier as well.
And somehow those credits all count for your course back stateside! It’s the best deal out there — that’s why I did it for a full year rather than just a semester, though a semester may be enough for you.
What’s more, living abroad in an urban shared flat with young professionals taught me how to live alone as an adult, far more than living on a suburban campus complete with a dining hall and meal plans did.
It was only once abroad that I truly felt like an adult, free of the relative nursery of college, and having to figure out things like mattresses and groceries on a regular basis.
Major in Passion, Minor in Career
Now the next question is what you should major in. Just like all the adults have been asking you where you’re applying to college, this will become the new icebreaker question strangers will use when they learn you’re in college.
“So what’s your major?” It’s the undergraduate version of ‘so what do you do?’.
You probably don’t know what you’re majoring in yet. Most incoming freshman don’t, even if they aren’t undeclared. And hopefully your university gives you the time to decide and sample things before settling.
I’m here to tell you that you should major in what you want to major in. Choose something you’re passionate about, enough not to get bored of it after 4 years. Don’t choose it solely for the career prospects it may present — because if you aren’t passionate about those career prospects, chances are you will burn out of that too.
People like to joke how modern college degrees are useless- Underwater Basket Weaving 101 or whatever else. But here’s the thing — if you’re truly passionate about learning about something, it shouldn’t matter what other people think about that thing. And pursuant to my next point, majors outside of science are mostly irrelevant to your career prospects.
So pick something you care about, and use the rigor an undergraduate degree offers to get you closer to that thing.
I entered college with a major in Economics, because I thought that offered the best career prospects, only to be felled by Calculus, whereupon I switched to International Studies — Political Science, mostly because it afforded me the opportunity to study abroad for a year (as belied in the previous point). Then I minored in Business, for career reasons, (where accounting did become helpful in real life business, fair enough.)
If I did it again, I’d probably major in Philosophy. PoliSci made me write long essays about Brazil’s trade policies, which was interesting, but philosophy makes you write long essays about the nature of reality and logic, which are great skills for anything you’ll do in life afterwards.
That’s just me, and you’ll have different priorities, but it’s something to think about. What skills will this major give me and how useful will they be in the postgraduate world?
Nobody Cares About College After College
Here’s a little secret — unless you major in a Bachelor of Sciences (BS) or plan to go to graduate school, what you major in, much less your college GPA, doesn’t matter at all in the real world.
Yes, I’ll say that again. Your major and grades don’t matter after college.
All that matters is if you went to a name-brand school, and your alma mater is well known enough on the West Coast to fit this criteria (though not in the top echelon of Ivy League names that will open doors wherever you go).
College is a checkmark that modern employers look for, but it doesn’t go much farther than that (at least in nontechnical fields.) Where you went to college becomes this obscure fact about you that only close friends will know, or a random conversation point with strangers who also went there.
Professionally, it only comes up interviewing for your first job — and after that, they only ask about your last job. If you have the skills they need (most often gathered outside of the classroom in internships and the like), that’s all they need to know.
For now, rest easy knowing that you’re in this weird liminal space where you have all the rights of an adult without any of the responsibilities.
It’ll all work out — you have essentially ‘made it’ by getting accepted to a good college, and you’re out of the high school pressure cooker of having to strive towards the next life milestone.
There’s always another life milestone to strive for (job, spouse, house, kids are the next few) but those are the ones you can opt out of much more easily than one can high school or college.
But that’s for the next letter when you graduate college, perhaps :).
Until then, learn from me (or not), and have fun! I love you!
— Corey
