The Freshman Experience week7

Andrew Lehman
News Editor

So where exactly are the Gates of Hell that were supposed to greet us as we entered college?

Most of my teachers in high school made college seem like a sort of purgatory. No one was supposed to care about you. The professors were supposed to be old and bitter and not give a damn about you. Schoolwork was supposed to dominate every waking hour, leaving no time for socializing.

Could it be that our high school teachers were wrong?

Well, let's present the evidence.

All of my classes have less than 45 people in them. That is a sharp contradiction to the massive lecture halls that my high school teachers told me about. I was supposed to be in classes with 200 people where the professors did not take roll and did not care if you were there or not, according to my former teachers.

The professors in my classes do care. Two of them practice the habit of calling students who have the tendency of not showing at their class. They take great interest in their students and are easily accessible. College professors seem to be more accessible than high school teachers.

There is a surplus of free time. I have never had so much free time. I get my homework done and still have plenty of time to do whatever I want. I am even learning how to play the guitar. I never had the time to do that in high school.

In general, everyone is friendly on campus. People are quick to throw a smile or glance your way even if they don't know you. However, they may be smiling because they think you were the person they met at the party the night before. But who cares. There are no "popular" kids here who run the school. We are all just trying to make it on our own.

Now, here is the most striking evidence.

There are no Gates to Hell here. I searched high and low for them. I even checked in the cafeteria for them. I figured that if I found them, I could close them and stop more of those annoying people from coming out. But alas, I could not find the Gates.

So college is not quite the hell that high school was. How many movies about digruntled, depressed and suicidal college students do you know of? That's what high school is for. College is to get out on your own and enjoy life.

High school teachers placed the Gates of Hell at the wrong place. They should be at high school not college. The gates that are entered at college are those of opportunity..