Prior to your kid going off to the college, I’m sure you and your kid learned about the college from the college visit during middle and high school years, guidance counselor, reputation, hearsay, USNWR, Princeton Review, Googling and whatnot. From these, we all have formulated certain images about the college, and for those who have had no prior experience with the college, I’m sure there are things that you and your kid, once the school starts, would find quite aligned with the preconceptions about the college while there are things that surprise you, i.e., outside of your preconceptions – both in positive and disappointing directions, I’m sure. I’ll start off with the following:
My S ('22) is back home for the winter break – first time being back home since the start of the school. We of course talked about what it’s like being at the college for the first time and so on. He said many things about his college, but one thing that made me burst out laughing was that the toilet tissues that his college uses in every residential dorms are so rough and painful to use that someone literally ran for the undergraduate student council seat – and won! – on the promise to fix that problem.
Harvard switched from one-ply to two-ply toilet paper my senior year and it got picked up by the Associated Press! My best friend’s grandmother from Paducah, Kentucky called him when she read about it in the local paper.
Not specific to my college, but since my parents only had boys, and living in all boys dorms at boarding school, I was a bit surprised in college to learn that many girls’ bathrooms are more disgusting that the boys’
@TiggerDad It was only supplied in community bathrooms. He and his roommate had their own bathroom, and they had to purchase their own TP. I hadn’t realized he’d never purchased it before!
I was surprised by the level of personal care in the dining hall. They’d make you almost anything you asked for if they had the ingredients on hand. If you wanted a type of cereal they didn’t carry in the 16 (!!) dispensers, they’d buy you a box.
I was ALSO surprised by most students’ jadedness about this kind of thing. They mostly did not view this as a luxury experience…but it was.
How much time people spend doing laundry when one lives in a dorm.
When my mother gave them laundry service as HS graduation present a present they weren’t all that excited. Them they saw how much time and hassle it could be for those people who did their own. They were very very grateful that their limited free time didn’t have to be spent doing laundry.
@maya54 For kids who do not do laundry or cook, or anything along those lines, it does come as a shock just how much time one spends on these everyday chores. They don’t realize that they get getting clothes dirty every day and just how quickly the dirties pile up. Same with food - if you want freshly cooked food every day, it means that you need to spend a whole lot of time cooking and shopping for food. I wish they would teach THAT in school…
Better than rough newspapers I used when growing up.
I can tell you smart kids from East coast almost never applied to Stanford in late 1970s. I remember the colleges that smart kids from my high school kids in VA applied to: Harvard, Cornell, MIT, Yale, U of Chicago, Swarthmore, Brown. I don’t think even one kid applied to Stanford. UVA was a safety back then to smart kids.
Cafeteria food not good at top colleges, which surprised me. I guess all the money don’t go towards improving cafeteria foods. They really need to learn how UCLA does it.
@MWolf. It wasn’t the time to do laundry generally that they were unfamiliar with. It was the time and huge hassle to do it when it was in a communal space especially where in one kids case it required going outside the dorm. It made them prioritize in unit laundry or budgeting for a service in their real lives.
As for cooking, neither cooked at home. Maybe because it wasn’t something I even allowed them to do ( I’m very territorial about my kitchen) both consider it a privilege and a pleasure. I should only be as good a cook as they are. But both did learn from observing me that it’s not that hard or time consuming to cook simple stuff.
After a relatively heated call around Thanksgiving my son discovered there isn’t a mythical and elusive creature that pays the Ubereats and Amazon bill.
My son discovered that there was another person in the world messier than him - his roommate. Apparently, they worked out their issues because they are now sophomores and still rooming together.
When my D went to college, she was shocked by the laundry experience and took it on herself to teach all of her brothers how to do laundry. I have 5 kids so we actually have 2 washers and 2 driers in the basement, so it was kind of like a communal situation. With a smartphone, kids can put their laundry in and get an alert when it’s finished.
I don’t know if it was things about college but maybe more things about other kids! My youngest was shocked that many of her college classmates have never had to take a breathalizer test to get into an event or been stopped at the Walmart door to have the receipt checked.
I suggest to change the title to “Things About Life that Your Kid Didn’t Know About Before Leaving Home” For many kids if not most, college is the first time getting to know the real world, meeting different people and learning to be independent.
@websensation - “Cafeteria food not good at top colleges, which surprised me. I guess all the money don’t go towards improving cafeteria foods. They really need to learn how UCLA does it.”
My S told me that Princeton throws so much free food (outside of the meal plan) at you all throughout the year that he’s absolutely convinced that it’s in their unwritten mission statement to ensure everyone graduates fat. Unfortunately, he said the food is quite unpalatable and mediocre at best that he and his friends would sneak off the campus once in awhile to assuage the pang in their ethnic stomach. While waiting for his flight home for the winter break from EWR a few days ago, he texted me saying exactly what foods he’s been dreaming of eating right after we pick him up at the airport. At the restaurant, he ordered two of his favorite dishes for himself and had no problem finishing them all clean. He told us then that he believes UCLA (he has some friends there) has the best college food of them all – with an envious tone in his voice.
On a bit more serious side, a huge discrepancy between my S’s preconceptions and the actual reality that he soon discovered upon settling in at Princeton had primarily to do with his intimidation factor. He knew that at Princeton, although they had done away with the practice of grade deflation a few years ago, grading still resembles more of the past practice than anything and that he’d have to work his butts off just to survive. Sure enough, once he got there, he hardly called home, he didn’t attend any Ivy conference sporting events, even those held at home, didn’t take advantage of his residential college’s fun trip to NYC to watch an opera at the Met, etc. to my consternation. He spent the whole time studying like mad, and I knew then that he had been lot more intimidated about Princeton than I had imagined. It was only after his successful mid-term exams that he started to settle into his daily routine in a bit more relaxed manner.
Upon coming home for the winter break, he basically confessed to us that his greatest fear of being at Princeton was finding himself a below average student there. The mid-term exams sort of served as a yardstick to see where he’s at, I guess. Echoing the statements about Princeton by Michelle Obama in her book, “Becoming,” he apparently also didn’t find “brilliance, Genius” at every turn. Rather, he found kids more like him – just average. What I now sensed in him at home is no trace of intimidation that I once saw in him. As a parent, I’m relieved.
