1st DAY MADNESS…
(Junior College as it is!)
The excitement, fear, confusion, anticipation and exhilaration pretty much sums up all the emotions that surge through a student on the first day of JUNIOR COLLEGE! As the transition from school to college marks our first milestone into the real world, the first day can be quite an electrifying and daunting adventure. Here are some of the things we all face on our first day as a college student!
THE SCHOOL SCENT:
Freshly out of school, none of us have any idea as to how college life is. We enter the college campus and are slightly mortified to see students sans the discipline! We are so used to being monitored by teachers or prefects all the time that this new found freedom becomes a bit of a challenge to handle at first. Nevertheless, it scripts our first stage of the journey from schooling to college life!
PUSHED AND SHOVED:
We, the newbies, the novices, the newcomers are naïve in the territory of the seniors! We still haven’t figured out the route to our classes, we don’t know where all the stairwells lead to, we don’t know any teachers, and hell, we don’t have the liberty to depend on our friends who are sailing in the same boat as we are. So what do we do? We just go with the flow, get trampled by the seniors who are perhaps annoyed with our disruptive presence and try to maintain our cool till we figure out our way!
THE AWKWARDNESS:
Raise your hands if this has happened to you- no one knows who the class teacher is and everybody is nervous and jumpy as it is. So you have managed to reach your class, you wait outside the door, you fidget with your clothes, take a reassuring breath and march into the classroom, hoping to see some known faces. But the minute you are inside those four walls, all the students who are already seated mistake you to be the teacher for a couple of seconds and stare at you as they get tensed up. Getting uncomfortable due to their overwhelming stare and the awkwardness of ‘Everybody is looking at me’, you forget about finding a good seat and instead touch down on the first empty spot that you can lay your eyes on!
THE JUDGEMENT DAY:
Now that you are seated in class, you notice that some people have already formed their groups or are with their school friends and see them blabbering away. So you start making small talk to the ones seated nearest to you, selecting the ones that you think could make good friends and cunningly avoiding those who annoy you. This goes on until the first teacher, mostly your class teacher, enters the classroom. One by one different professors introduce themselves to you and you go on making a mental note of the ones you like, the ones that scare the (pick your word) out of you, the ones that are dull, the ones who manage to make you laugh and so on…the first day is almost a snap judgment day! (P.S. your opinions go on changing throughout the year!)
AN EMOTIONAL TURBULENCE:
Then comes the break time which unleashes a whole new set of questions for you! ‘Should I open my dabba and eat in class, or would that look really uncool? Should I just take a trip to the canteen and find out what all it has to offer? But who do I go with? What if there is too much of a crowd in the canteen and I don’t make it back in time for my next lecture? I don’t want to be bunking my lectures on the first day! Oh dear, the people I just met want to go to the canteen of another college on the very first day!! I really don’t want to go, but if I deny, I will have lost friends before I have even made any. Forget it, I lost my appetite. Now where is the washroom? Better go answer natures call beforehand as I don’t want to ask for permission to use the restroom in the middle of any lecture; that would be embarrassing… Oh snap, the breaks over! Sigh.’
TRY TRY TILL YOU ACCEPT DEFEAT:
You had expected the first day to be as smooth as a baby’s butt. You were excited at the thought of finding new friends but you just managed to get a few acquaintances! You start questioning if you chose the right college for yourself. You even wonder if it’s too late to run for it and get admission into another one. You come home with a heavy heart and worry that you are going to have to hit repeat every day. (Trust me, it gets better than you could have ever expected when you find your perfect gang of friends!)
THE BEGINNING OF A NEW CHAPTER:
Whether the first day was a piece of cake for you or a challenge in itself, it would be a day you would remember at the end of twelfth and think to yourself, “Junior college was such an amazing phase of my life, I would gladly go back to that difficult first day, just to live it all again!”
Well that’s how it went for me! But to those of you who had a fantastic first day, kudos! You did well kid.
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