I’m sure that over the next week or so, each of you incoming freshman who still practice the lost art of reading from time to time might flip to this page and find words of advice, notes on what to expect, and predictions about the next four years of your life.
As I can’t bring myself to write one of these sappy little life-lesson tripe-filled whine-fests, my little welcome to you has only one piece of advice in it: Ignore these, they’re all crap.
No, really, I mean it.
During my first week of school in those halcyon days as a younger and much more idiotic student of OSU, when I first discovered the O’Colly, I picked up and read the Opinion page to find some useless little advice and dull, repetitive tripe about what I might expect to learn over the next four years of my life.
In short, none of it helped.
Call me a raging, filthy cynic if you want, and I’ll probably agree with you, but the point of the matter is that even if we sit here, high and mighty in our older and wiser (at the very least, older) little personal bubbles, we don’t want you to make the same mistakes we did.
You probably will, that’s a fact of life.
If you’re worth half your weight in college material, you might take some lessons away from this and prepare yourself for that so-called “adulthood” we all keep hearing so much about.
But nothing that I or any other columnist can write will change who you are or how you will respond to what lies ahead.
That’s for you to handle.
Sorry, but we can’t give you a map for that journey, as these are lessons you have to come across and learn yourself.
The British author Douglas Adams once said “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”
He put it better than I ever could, but my little hypothesis, as I call it, the “Hot Stove Theory,” expounds upon this a little: A young child does not know that a stove is hot, nor even that hot equals pain, until he burns himself on the stove.
Sometimes, they have to burn themselves a few times before the lesson really sinks in.
Adults, unfortunately, are no different, except for the fact that the stove is life and relationships, money and careers, and other things no class will ever teach you, and many of us will never figure out that our hand is becoming rather charred and crispy.
So, if you’re smart, you’ll learn.
If you were really smart, you’d learn from the others around you, but that’s not likely to happen.
I didn’t, and I know very few people who have.
I suppose, however, that if you’re going to learn some life lessons, there’s no better place to do it than here.
There’s a saying I ran into a few years ago that has always given me a chuckle. “There’s a time and a place for everything; it’s called college.”
Here’s to that, hopefully worthwhile, definitely unforgettable time and place..
Originally printed in the Daily O’CollegianAugust 22, 2005
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