Silver Lining: Parking Stinks, or What I Learned In College

Last week I got an email from one of my best friend's moms (hi Mary!) asking my advice for her young women's church group, who are graduating and going off to college in the next few months. "What's your advice?" she asked, and I immediately thought parking stinks. go ahead and plan your whole college career around the fact that you'll never have good parking.

Then, due to the fact that I generally try to sound like an intelligent person, I started thinking of something else to say. This morphed into a few hours of solid introspection, and the email became more about how to find yourself and develop as a person, and nothing to do with college at all. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and finally pared it down to three mostly related paragraphs, because, after all, who wants to read all about my personal conversion into whatweliketocalladulthood?

So here are my three pared down paragraphs. I could say 5,000 more things about 5,000 more things, about dating and marriage and marrying and how to recover when you bury your mother at 19 years old and ex-boyfriends and how to sleep when your roommate burns incense that gives you headaches. But I'll save those for 5,000 blog posts to be published later, or maybe never at all.

1. There's going to be a girl on your hall who gets asked out every Friday and Saturday night, and weeknights too. There will be a girl on your hall who has more cute clothes than you, more free time than you, more money than you, more ANYTHING than you. I spent a whole semester trying to be like THAT girl, and it got me nowhere. People don't like me-pretending-to-be-that-girl. People like me.

2. Do the optional stuff - the memories I cherish the most are the times in which I did the extra things. I went to the party, I did the service project, I attended the devotional, I took the weekend trip. It's easy to say to no something optional, especially because nobody's checking up on you like at home, but this is a time in your life to say yes! It's a time to explore new things, have new opportunities, and make new memories.

3. My first semester at college, someone told me "this campus can be as big or as small as you make it." It's true. If you go around saying hi to nobody, making no new friends, sitting by yourself in class and waiting for someone else to get things going, you'll feel lost and lonely among a gigantic campus. On the other hand, if you initiate social activities, get to know your professors, say hi to everyone, and go to your ward activities, you'll feel like the campus is a small, tight-knit family. You choose the type of experience you'll have.

4. Parking still stinks.