I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the highly mythologized “college experience.” To this day, it eludes me.

As I approach the end of my third year at LSU, I’ve found myself questioning whether I’ve done enough to make the most of my time here. Sometimes I’ll sit deep in the bowels of Middleton Library, deliberately avoiding all of my responsibilities, and wonder: Is this it? Is this what college is?

I can confidently report that the majority of American teens and young adults set certain expectations for their college lives long before ever setting foot on an actual campus.

You learn what college is supposed to be like things you might have picked up from your least favorite uncle as he waxed reminiscent on his “glory days,” or maybe from your friend’s cool older brother who’s back in town for the holidays; or, even more regrettably, from some godawful blockbuster movie (we all saw ”Transformers 2,” right?). 

Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before: college is supposed to be the time of your life! It’s where you’ll find your lifelong friends! It’s where you’ll make your wildest, greatest memories! It might even be where you met your soulmate. This concept of the uber cool college experience as we know it today only really started taking off in the ’60s and ’70s. 

There’s no disputing that the structure of today’s life is a stark contrast to what it had been in generations past. At some point after the Industrial Revolution, academia became the hot new item on the menu. These days, Americans are attending college in greater numbers than ever before, a phenomenon that can primarily be attributed to an increase in the cultural emphasis placed on the importance of higher education. 

With enrollment in a four-year university now the most prevalent next step among recent high school graduates, the college years seem an almost intrinsic stage in the average American life. 

We’ve managed to craft an extensive repertoire of elaborate narratives for the ever-prominent “college experience.” We do this ritual storytelling in an attempt to come to some shared societal understanding, not only of the experience in question, but of ourselves as purveyors of the experience.

We hope to create fantasies that we can ascribe to our own lives. It’s how we justify ourselves: what we’re doing and who we are, what we value, what we want. I suspect that this modern culture of fantasy and the  over-inflation of this idea of college life is only a symptom of a larger discontentment.

The myth of the gold standard college experience, in which every day is a keg party and nobody’s lonely, is just that: a myth. It can be damaging,  as it so often fosters in us these sky-high expectations that must invariably give way to disappointment. 
College isn’t as shiny and happy as everyone would like to make it seem. Why not accept it? I haven’t exactly had the dreamy experience I’d been hoping for when I first arrived on campus as a freshman, but who among us actually has? Maybe having the real “college experience” just means figuring out that there isn’t one. Maybe you just have to make your own. I think I’m alright with the one I’ve cut out for myself. 
Grace Pulliam is an 18-year-old creative writing junior from Zachary, Louisiana.