Confidently Unsure

Making the Transition from High School to College

By Aidan Mathews

Author Jarod Kintz once told us that “College has given me the confidence I need to fail” — painfully cliché but undeniably true. Perhaps the only true difference between high school and college is confidence, or at least the understanding that everyone is just as skeptical about themselves and the world and their future as you are.

High school sucks because it’s just uncomfortable without that balancing dose of confidence. Think about it, you’re constantly trying to prove something to someone else — or even worse — prove somebody wrong. And on top of that, there is always someone “better” than you, even if they are not. It’s not right or wrong, it’s just the way teenagers are programmed in a high school setting, it’s all about defiance — unnecessary and inappropriate defiance. So much of that occurs that you forget whom you’re defying and often times one can start living for the external world more than the internal. He or she relies on the outer image they give off because in high school people do not see the common ground; the common angst; the common skepticism, the common awkwardness.

Now I have yet to experience college, but I have had my college orientation not too long ago and learned something valuable from that experience: everyone is just as uncomfortable as you are. That’s the thing about college, you are given an unbiased and unconditional sense of confidence by simply stepping foot on campus and seeing all the other incoming freshman who were just as unsure and ticked off as you often were in your high school days and are collectively looking forward to being on their own surrounded by those who care about what they study and who they study with. This common bridge between person to person in a collegiate experience makes way for the uncommon to surface. If there is something that I have learned from an excelled education it is when students choose to be common in an awareness of one another’s feelings and position, a true effort for excellence takes form.

I know this to be true because I have seen the faces of and have talked to friends and family who are currently college students. I remember the first thing I asked my brother upon his return home for winter break of his freshman year of college: “what is the biggest difference?” He then told me that “the simple difference is that you want to be there.” He further explained the ironic elegance of the college lifestyle and how one actually looks forward to going to class and enjoys studying and working hard because its for something you chose to do – that’s what I look forward to most – the ability to choose what has meaning and what does not. From what I’ve gathered from my premature knowledge of what college is, it is that choosing comes into play more than it ever has in your life prior.

I realize that I am making high school out to be horrendous, but that is not the intent. High school is a very important piece in a young person’s journey both as a student and as a person. I often look at high school as the necessary tedium everyone must endure to earn the coveted “afterlife” that is college and your future. Don’t get me wrong, my high school experience was awesome in many ways, and I have made some lifelong friends doing it, but I see the joys of high school as the tip of the iceberg when considering what college has to offer an aspiring student. Plainly, what I look forward to in college is the confidence to be uncomfortable and detached from what was once so familiar. I look forward to shared skepticism for what is to come but at the same time shared enthusiasm with a healthy dose of fear for what our bright futures behold.