Reflections on freshman year: Take our advice, new kids at Rice

Back in my younger and more vulnerable years, I received a piece of advice from a rafting guide on a eighth grade trip to Big Bend, which I have been turning over in my head ever since I remembered it this summer. “You should go to college,” he said. “Sure, the education is great, but it’s the most fun you’ll ever have.”

Congratulations freshmen, you made it to the utopia of my eighth-grade fantasies. You went through the mind-numbing standardized tests, self-serving personal essays, snobbish interviews and in the process became a huge tool. We all went through it. Now you must unlearn what you have learned.

Students spend the college application process piling up a list of awards, achievements, titles and tales of lifelong struggle. And now they must all be shed, like a caterpillar sheds a cocoon, to become a fun-loving, hard-studying college student — or butterfly. Whatever. This personal cleansing may be difficult for people who worked intensely to get where they are today and may leave them asking why they labored so hard in high school just to forget it now.

But the truth is, no one is impressed that you were the president of the Latin Club, Junior Statesmen Governor or quarterback of your high school football team. And no one will be impressed if you become president of the Rice Latin Club, president of the Student Association or quarterback on a flag football team.

So forget your resume. Sign up for clubs and classes that you find enjoyable, not credential-boosting. This is the secret to combining the fun of college with the educational process.

If you can pull an academic all-nighter and not mind, you’re on the right track. If you can in read a textbook from one of your classes for fun, you’re on the right track. If you hang out in your club’s office in your free time, you’re on the right track. Just never use your college application essay as a dinner conversation (except perhaps in jest). Now the only person you have to impress is yourself, whether it is through that 4.0 GPA representing how much you’ve learned or that purity score of 4.0 representing how crazily you’ve partied.

Back in high school, everything was aimed toward college, but now you have cleared the narrow academic tunnel and can see the open field of life, prime for frolicking and harvesting. Once you were a tool, but now you should feel free to use tools like bottle-openers (fun) and Lexis-Nexis (educational). So be a good collegiate butterfly and be yourself, not your resume.

Besides, if you really want to impress people, you can always just give in to peer pressure. Feel free to interpret that however you like.

Evan Mintz is a Hanszen College sophomore and opinion editor.

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