I used to think I was smart. I also used to think I was funny and that people liked me. Sure enough, I was wrong about all of those things.
College is kind of like a series of mousetraps. For the first year or two, all the traps have broken springs. Provolone, Swiss, American, you name it. They’re just giving out free cheese!
About three weeks into your third year, you get your leg caught for the first time. Eventually you manage to wiggle your way out with only a few broken bones, but you still believe the whole thing was a fluke.
Then it happens again. And again. You can’t even walk anymore without little mouse-crutches that you had to buy for $125 from some sketchy guy in a trench coat behind the Student Union. On top of that, all the cheese is moldy now.
Welcome to the reality of higher education.
Now, freshman year might not be necessarily easy for everyone, but it’s usually significantly more so than the following years. A lot of us were able to breeze through our first years with exceptional grades, maybe without even going to most of our classes.
I actually showed up 50 minutes late to my freshman chemistry final and still got an A. I really thought I was smarter than everyone else.
By my sophomore year, those effortless A’s started to become effortless B’s.
The trend continued for my junior year.
By the time I got to the present school year, I was questioning whether I’d even been reading clocks correctly.
The weird thing is that I don’t even think it’s just that my courses have gotten harder. I think I’ve actually gotten dumber over the last three years. I’m pretty sure that if my past self had met my current self, we could have starred in one of those “Oh gosh, after having seen myself in the future, I really need to turn my life around” movies.
I’m thinking Brad Pitt for the old me and George Clooney for the present-day version.
This “dumbification” process would be a lot more tolerable if everyone else were sharing the experience, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. My peers seem to have somehow gotten smarter.
I might ask someone in my class how they did number three.
“Oh, it’s easy. 3a = 4b.”
But there are neither a’s nor b’s in this problem.
“Yeah, but you forgot to carry the 873,459,874.”
Oh, OK.
So then I might go read the textbook — by the way, I’ll keep you guys posted about our end-of-the-semester book burning. After three hours of intense study, I’ll finally manage to decipher the title of the first chapter. Woo!
When I emerge from the pre-test haze, everyone around me is punching away on their calculator, but I’m already done with mine. After receiving a zero on the exam, it didn’t take me too long to compute what my final grade would be.
These days, Moodle is like my checking account balance. I know it’s there, and I know there are usually numbers being updated on it, but I choose not to look at it. Ignorance is bliss, especially ignorance of the extent of your own ignorance.
But sometimes I long to taste informed bliss. O understanding, where art thou?
To underclassmen who think you’re geniuses: you probably aren’t. The University works in mysterious ways, and those ways are often quite humbling. Get ready.
To any other upperclassmen swimming around in the pit of confusion with me: There’s a picture of my face in the upper corner of this column. If you see me talking with people in the library, go ahead and have a nice laugh to yourself because there’s a good chance I have no idea what I’m talking about.
Your semester might be awful in almost every way, but at least you can take solace in the fact that you aren’t alone.
Ryan Monk is a 21-year-old chemical engineering major senior from Lake Charles, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter @RyanMonkTDR.