Around four weeks ago, a very nervous freshman came to campus for the Freshman Academic Institute (FAI). She managed to actually get out, converse with the other kids, get to class on time and do her technical first pieces of college homework.
New discoveries were made every day: don’t go to dinner right after the football boys shower because you do have a possibility of getting trampled, she should’ve brought her cute red leather jacket, she didn’t have to call her parents secretly because basically everyone does call at one point in time, going across the railroad tracks at night is very sketchy, what happens at Björklunden stays at Björklunden, Antojitos is a fantastic Mexican food restaurant down on College Avenue, naps save lives, and there are SO MANY STAIRS EVERYWHERE.
This girl slowly but surely adapted in this strange and new environment. By the end of the three weeks, the freshman believed she could make it in college pretty easily. I mean she survived FAI, how bad can actual college get?
However, as welcome week commenced, she slowly began to realize she’s going to have to actually wait for showers to open up in the mornings, her room can’t be a mess because another human being will also live in not her space, but their space, actual classes are starting in a week and there will be hundreds of upperclassmen coming to campus. So this confident-about-college girl blossomed beautifully back into the very nervous freshman she was three weeks ago.
Remembering that she has, indeed, been at Lawrence for three weeks already though, she knew she’d be fine. The freshman managed to meet and talk with others like she had at the beginning of FAI, and even hugged a lot of forgotten-about strangers at Playfair.
So now the girl knows that college will have its trials she’ll have to get over. Like climbing the stairs she has to climb after eating in Andrew Commons, it might seem like forever to get over the trials. And she will most likely be breathless by the end of it. But she will get there!
Although FAI didn’t erase all nervous stresses about starting college (THE INFINITE NUMBER OF STAIRS), it did relieve a lot of them. All in all, cheesy as it might sound, FAI did help with the transition from the end of one chapter of her life to the beginning of a big one. The very nervous freshman is now just a regular old freshman working for The Lawrentian.
