How to survive your first October in college

Dear Reader,

My first fall in Evanston was beautiful and filled with anxiety. I was doing terribly in all my classes. I had just met some of my best friends. I frequently ate dinner from vending machines. I loved my job, I hated being alone.

I was convinced that I was the first person in the history of the world to experience all of this.

Needless to say, I was not. As I found out a year or two later, I was actually excruciatingly normal. My life has changed a lot since that first fall, but it’s still beautiful here. To celebrate the season, here is another list, in no particular order. This time, it’s the spookiest things about starting college and my own personal ways of combating them.

Self-care is hard because it is preventative.
I, like many Northwestern undergraduates, was very used to getting rewarded for good behavior. Get good grades, go to a good college. Start an essay early, get a good grade. So on and so forth. Unfortunately, the reward for good self-care is that you stay alive and you can do things in the future. I discovered this roughly one month into my college career (enough time for me to get tired of micromanaging myself and making sure I got enough vegetables). The lack of an immediate dopamine rush for doing things, such as giving myself a break or moisturizing, meant that it was ten times harder for me to do anything. For a while, I was baffled by my inability to do normal tasks until I realized that I was searching for positive reinforcement, like the little confetti that Canvas does when you turn in your discussion question. Tragically, things like not getting scurvy, remaining upright and not developing sinus infections were insufficient to spur me into healthy, normal habits. Thus, vending machine dinners. My solution? Check the next point.

Take care of yourself the way you’d take care of a toddler.
Going to school and being independent for the first time is like getting handed a baby that you have to take care of. You have to feed it on time and the right amount, make sure it gets enough sleep and ensure it stays clean. If you’re like me, for most of your life up to this point, your schedule or your parents were helping out with a lot of those things. Someone told you when to wake up and when you should go to bed, you got served a decent amount of your meals, and you didn’t have to also worry about running into people in your dorm bathroom or finding a place to cry without your roommate noticing. It’s not stupid to slip up with this stuff when you’re first starting out. We all do. You’ve practically been handed an unpaid, 24/7, babysitting job, and anyone would be a little grumpy about that at first.

Walk up Sheridan like you actually mean it.
I am as adamant about this as I was in my freshman year. If you are meandering down Sheridan Road during the hours of 9 a.m. through roughly 7 p.m., you have absolutely no business walking down the dead center of the sidewalk. Act like you have somewhere to be (because don’t you?), or take a side road. Sheridan Road, as far as I’m concerned, is our equivalent of the freeway, so if you’re not prepared to absolutely floor it, step aside and leave those of us with classes across campus an unobstructed path. Or go lollygag somewhere else and get there with some initiative!

The learning curve is real, and you’re at the bottom of at least one.
I wasn’t lying when I said I was not doing well in my classes. What they forget to tell you (or maybe I forgot to listen. Whatever, same difference.) about a learning curve is that you spend quite a lot of time struggling along and exhausting yourself over that flat line at the bottom before everything clicks into place. And unluckily for me, I was trying to learn approximately 20 new skills at once. So most of my first quarter (and my first year, if we’re being realistic) felt like an unrelenting failure from all sides, and I’m sorry to report that it pretty much was. But I can promise you that as much as it might feel like continually hitting your head against a brick wall and then coming back for more, sooner or later you will hit that blessed exponential curve for something. I never really came around to pipetting, but I can tell you I’m a much, much better journalist than I was three years ago.

Go out with a buddy.
The most obviously spooky part about October in college is Halloweekend, and honestly, I’m not even sure if I’m qualified to give you advice on this one. My costumes of the last few years have alternated between completely illegible (Ozma of Oz) and wildly uncomfortable (I am never wearing a corset again). I also realized I’m simply unable to go to more than two locations in one evening, ever. My one piece of advice is that among the people you choose to go out with, make sure at least one has to have your back completely, even if you wear the worst costume ever, start sprinting up Sheridan with no warning or need to pee at the absolute least convenient time. Make sure you have someone who will find the nearest bathroom, run up the road after you or at the very least keep you company. And that’s the real magic of Halloweekend. (Also, it’s always somehow literally freezing on Halloweekend and never before then.)

Bad feelings are a) temporary and b) normal.
To bring it back around to freshman year me, who would pace up and down my minuscule single in the brief moments she wasn’t stressing about chemistry (irrelevant), walking to class (exhausting) or desperately combing the internet to find someone who had felt precisely the way she was feeling and fixed it instantly (exhausting and irrelevant), whatever you’re feeling has probably been felt before. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck, but it does mean you’re not alone. And, furthermore, whatever you’re worried or sad or angry about, the vast majority of the time, it won’t last forever. I didn’t know this at the time, but storms blow over, wounds heal and you will be okay. At the very least, you can hang on until Christmas.

And if it really gets bad, just write me a letter. I’ll try my best to respond!

If you have a pressing problem you need advice on, or a response to this, email [email protected] with “Best Guess” in the subject line.

Mika Ellison is a Medill senior. She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.