TEEN CENTER :: COLLEGE CENTER

FRESHMAN JOURNAL: OCTOBER 3, 2004
'Name-Hometown-Major'

By Abha Bhattarai

The first time I realized that maybe I didn't quite have it all together was on the second day of classes.

I made it through my first class of the morning and ran to my next one hoping to spare myself the embarrassment of being late. My geology class was supposed to begin at 11:00, so I asked a few people if I was in the right building and then made my way to room 102. When I opened the door and saw a professor in mid-lecture and a classroom full of students staring back at me, I quietly promised myself I would never be late again. I picked up a copy of the syllabus on the table at the front and made my way to a seat in the back.

It wasn't until a few minutes later that I realized I'd walked into an upper-level philosophy class. I looked around the room with a blank stare and noticed that it was only 10:30. I spent the next twenty minutes shuffling through my bag for a pen, looking around at the other students, even trying to make sense of what the professor was saying - anything to make it less obvious that I was a freshman, a confused freshman, at that.

MAKING THE MOVE
I'd moved in to my dorm for over a week by the time classes began so I felt pretty comfortable making my way through campus and legitimately calling myself a college student. The first day of classes was a breeze because I only had one class that afternoon, so I walked back to my room thinking, "Wow, this is great." I read the 20-pages of homework that night with the kind of enthusiasm that wears off by the second week of school.

SETTLING IN
Orientation week was exactly how I'd imagined it. Move-in day was spent un-bunking beds, rearranging furniture and stashing clothes on shelves. By that evening, all of us had our introduction routines of "name-hometown-major" that we went through for a few days. But meeting thousands of new freshmen became very overwhelming, very quickly. All I knew was that I was ready to stop introducing myself to new people and have a group of friends like the ones I'd known for 9, 10, 11 years back home. There was an awkward period in the beginning as all of us tried to adjust to our new homes and as we got to know each other's backgrounds and personalities.

It's still a little difficult for me to fully understand that I'm actually in college. Dorm-life still feels like summer camp, and there are times when I find myself thinking that I'll be home in a few more weeks, as soon as this vacation ends and things go back to normal. But the reality is that I won't. Instead, I'll go home for the vacations, and then return to my "normal life" on campus.

It'll take a while for my dorm room to be "home" to me though. I ordered three of my textbooks online last week, and in a moment of confusion, I had my books shipped to an address that was a combination of my home in Texas and my dorm in Illinois: 1835 Hinman Avenue, Austin, TX. It's an address that doesn't quite exist, somewhere that the packages of books will never reach. Yet somehow, that's exactly where I am right now.