The Lawrentian tends to focus on students activities and opinions about what is going on within the Lawrence community. In an effort to permeate the Lawrence bubble, this column aims to shed some light on the views within the campus community about a current event outside of Lawrence.
With Spring Term drawing to a close, seniors and some forward-thinking underclassmen are undoubtedly considering their futures as adults in the world. When asked what living in the environment of a college means for our sense of adulthood, student responses were decidedly mixed.
“I feel like the college years are a limbo between the teen years and adulthood,” said junior Isabel Dammann. “I don’t feel like a totally independent being yet. My parents still pay my tuition and some of my plane tickets, I go home [a fair amount], and I don’t know how to pay taxes.”
Freshman Claire LaLiberte felt even more uncertain. “In some ways , I feel like an adult, but in other ways, I don’t, so I don’t really know. I feel mixed about it.”
Freshman Lauren Smrz, on the other hand, said that, “College has made me more of an adult, but I’m still very much a kid at heart.”
Sophomore Lexi Ames expressed a similar sentiment, and like Dammann, seemed to link adulthood and a greater understanding of finances. “The way [in which] I socially interact with people, I’m an adult,” Ames said. “But I have yet to learn how to pay bills or change a tire. So, I’m socially an adult, but the rest of me is not quite there.”
It seems that for junior Olivia Legan, having the kind of understanding with money management that other students lack has somewhat helped her feeling of adulthood,
“I feel like more of an adult than I think a lot of people do through living in Greenfire, because we shop for our own food, and I manage the finances usually.” However, she continued that, “As an independent person, as myself, I am still not financially stable. I still depend on a lot of things that aren’t going to be there in the next few years when we leave college.”
Although students do not fully feel grown up yet, some did think that Lawrence helps students progress closer to independent life. Dammann continued, “I think having leadership positions has really helped me feel more personally confident in my ability to organize things and potentially be an adult.”
Legan felt similarly, saying, “At this point, we do some real life things. We have to rely on ourselves to communicate, like with my bosses at my off-campus job or other students on campus. No one is going to do that for me. That’s something I think goes towards adulthood here.”