So you’ve been on campus for a few weeks. You’re in awe of all the young, beautiful women. You’re overwhelmed by the constant stream of information and entertainment. You’ve attended all the first week events and maybe you’ve had sex with a tight 18 year old discovering her freedom for the first time. You may think you know yourself, you may think you know everything, and you may be overwhelmed by the freedom you think you have. There’s one thing wish for you to understand and that is “you know nothing.” This is not a bad thing, but no matter how well you think you know yourself, your passions, or your morals, but the next four years will temper your youthful heat into the man you will soon be.
University has become a stepping stone into real life. You get the autonomy of living on your own without the responsibility that comes when the student loans dry up. When it comes down to it university is truly the best place to discover who you are deep down. Having been through it myself I can tell you this:
Social Life
Follow the 10 college commandments. Don’t get tied down by any one group or woman. Now is the time to be friends to every one you meet, to start as many relationships as you can. Hold your friends and lovers to a set of personal standards. If they do not meet these standards there are thousands of other people who would be great to be friends with. Don’t keep the do-nothings around, stay away from the angry idealists, shun the dudes with bad game, and reject the psycho chicks.
Many people I knew did not want to live in the dorms, but living in the dorms produced some of the best relationships and funnest nights. Watch what you eat, be mindful of who you fuck, and make sure you can bring value to any group. Eventually you should be at the point where you can walk down the street for 10 minutes and stop to say hi to a few people.
Like I said before watch what you eat in the dorms and hit the gym hard. University is the time to be building life long habits. One of these habits will be getting up before everyone else. When you wake up hours before your peers you can hit the gym, cook your food, and do your homework before your buddy calls you up to go drinking at 6pm.
The number one thing you should not do is waste time. You’ll have days where you just want to sit around and watch the Wire all day eating snacks, or you might get off class and surf Facebook for hours. Fuck that. You will never again have the same level of freedom you do now unless you work for yourself. Get everything you need done while the day is young then soak in as much experience as you can at night. Try to do everything you ever wished you could do.
Classes
Chose your classes wisely. Research your program so that you get all of your required courses out of the way before you head off to study abroad. Research the options your major gives you and if you find you’d rather party or travel instead of commit to learning why are you still in school?
When it comes to studying, university is the polar opposite of high school. In high school everything is defined for you. You get daily homework, frequent progress reports and the teacher’s job is to keep you on track. In university you have to do all this yourself. You can get by if you pay attention in class, but studying is more than memorizing facts. Learn concepts, be able to explain things, and most of all learn how to take tests better.
Wow, so much diversity!!!
Remember that a university is a business, but you also get out what you put in. It may seem like you’re paying exorbitant fee for a piece of paper, but depending on the school you get: prestige, connections, beneficial professor relationships, etc. You’re shelling out the cash, so work your hardest to get the most return on your investment.
Last of all make your own choices, take the advice of those wiser than you, but don’t feel the need to live up to someone else’s expectations; be it friends, family, or society. Even if you completely fuck everything up don’t regret it, you’re ahead of 90% of the world as it is. Have fun, don’t stress out, and live life to its fullest.
Read Next: The 10 College Commandments
Academically I have few regrets about the effort I put in and the results it gave me.
Personally I have few regrets about the habits I developed and what I learned.
Socially I deeply regret not living in a dorm or taking full advantage of the opportunities in front of me. I wish I had an older brother to tell me all this. I was ill prepared for the best opportunity of my life. You’ll never be in the presence of so many attractive women on a daily basis again. Wish I had someone to advise me to stay away from relationships.
At least I learned a lot ha.
“You’ll never be in the presence of so many attractive women on a daily basis again.”
Unless you become a college professor. 😉
lol,feminism: http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm
dafuq did I just read
You should be telling your freshman self that he fucked up by going into 5-zero debt just to get drunk and read books once in a while.
In just the past few years there has been major reconsideration as to whether or not so-called higher education is worth it from what you spend vs. what you get out of it in the long term. The Ivy League institutions are of course in a class all by themselves, but I am speaking in terms of the garden variety all-american universities and colleges. If you have the means to go without debt, then do so, but major in something connected to mathematics would be my advice. The Liberal Arts departments in colleges are feminazi boot camp sectors, and as a male student you will just be subject to scorn by professors and easily influenced female students. While the job market landscape has changed the trades have faired quite well. For many folks there may not be much prestige in that, but right now it is about being practical and not caring what skags think. I say this because seems like most men are always trying impress bitches with things like McMansions and expensive cars, etc. I do agree that the time in a mans life that make up his college years (late teens to early twenties) is a unique time. Perhaps get into the trades while crashing college parties? This may be a possibility, not sure. But I would encourage one to think college over before you walk yourself into debt.
I have to disagree. In my school girls dominate engineering and sciences. It’s truly quite frightening. I’m currently a freshman right now, but girls are below average. A lot dress like shit and aren’t dtf. Academics are exceptional though.
I have a useless liberal arts degree, but I didn’t go into debt to earn it so I’m in much better shape financially than many of my peers.
If I could communicate with my younger self, I would tell him to follow a blog called Roissy in DC.
I don’t consider the major education that important but the whole 5-7 years of freedom which one will be spent in a foreign country really gives me time to work on myself. I have time workout, socialize(I haven’t missed a single party this year), read books, and work on my personal projects. I appreciate this opportunity, especially when the whole thing is free for me and my family.
It’s hard to describe how different things were for an 18 year-old going off to college when I did in 1987. No Internet. No cell phones. Even computers were relatively rare, and reserved for techies. Video games were around, but they catered to 13 year-olds.
If you wanted to know anything, on any subject, you HAD to go to an expert. If you wanted to verify his opinion, you had to find another one. We had libraries, but the books on useful topics were almost impossible to find. Parents, older siblings and the weird adults who bothered to explain things to teenagers — these were literally the only source of information about anything.
There was no good advice anywhere on the important topics. Starting a business. Learning an instrument. What to major in. What novels to read. How to cook. How to remodel a room. How to fix a car. How to buy a stereo. How to take photos. How to bang girls.
We lived in a bubble of opinion and values and expectations that were given to us by the people immediately around us and little else. Even the news came exclusively from the TV, and it was all corporate homogenized propaganda, but we had nothing to compare it to, so it was just assumed to be the truth.
Young people had almost zero economic opportunities. Every now and then you’d hear of some youngish person who’d started a business. Michael Dell. Steve Jobs. But there were no entrepreneurs to be personally seen. If you wanted financial success, the ONLY routes were doctors and lawyers. Or inherit it. Or marry it. All other industries were locked up tight by protectionism, unions, licensing restrictions, and a thousand barriers to entry.
The only independent people were artists — writers, musicians and actors. Computers were the only open market.
But they were primitive. You couldn’t start an eBay business. You couldn’t trade stocks or Forex. You couldn’t develop an app or start a YouTube channel or a blog. We did that underground publishing thing, but did it for fun, for zero income. We made parody magazines and newsletters and gave them away. There was no money in it.
It’s hard to give advice to my former self, across this divide. The world is different, in ways no one could have predicted. The best careers to pursue today didn’t exist then.
The one piece of advice I’d give to myself would to be creative. Be unique. Fight homogenization of your mind and the culture. And I’d tell myself that to become truly great at anything complex, including art, athletics, or any valuable skill, it takes 10,000 hours of intense practice. Talent is a bullshit concept. Put no faith in it. Just work hard for 10 years or so, constantly pushing yourself to improve. Do that, and you’ll be great.
yes, that’s it…. find something you truly love and just go for it… even Slash admits he spent hour upon hour locked away in some studio apartment learning guitar…..
Outside of the top notch establishments, University is the biggest waste of time….. it makes you feel like you are doing something,…..when really it is just shrink wrapping your brain…. and lining you up for some nonsense crap low level management job…..
A buddy of mine left school at 12, he can still barely write properly, but he makes hundreds of thousands a year…. he’s a great business and he works on the phone….. life is what you make it…. no piece of paper or shitty college professor is going to change anything for you….
depends how one goes about it. If you don’t go to university, you need to prepare and work on your visions of what you want to be in the real world. This is a high risk/high reward endeavor. However don’t get sidetracked with chronic procrastination, rampant drug/alcohol addiction
This is what separates the men from the boys
Like it or not, peer networking is a huge part of college, and the author is correct to mention that it rivals the academic portion of college for importance, but it shouldn’t be limited to peer networking.
I was cleaning labs on the side for my department for some easy cash. As a thank you, I went to lunch at the Harvard Club (I didn’t go to Harvard, just a nearby university) with several of the professors from my department on Fridays, and got to know their regular crowd, including a very famous particle physicist from another university, and one time I got up to leave because I had to get home to catch the tide and check my lobster pots before dark, the physicist asks if he can come along as free labor. He ended up going fishing with me once a month or so for the next few years. Guy was one of Einstein’s doctoral students, designed the digital camera and the Hubble telescope, and he’d sit on the back of my boat and pound a few cans of bud light with me before getting in his car and going home.
Five years later, I’m working on an oceanographic ship and drove a truck to MIT (another VERY useful trade skill) to pick up a bunch of engineering parts for the eggheads’ experiments on the next voyage. I run into the guy, and he’s aged- pushing 70 at this point. He breaks out of his group, chews me out for not getting a doctorate, and makes me and his colleagues wait while he sends a grad student to get a case of beer for all of us. I end up drinking cheap-ass beer on a lawn with 2 astronauts and the head of NASA. I took a group photo, and good thing, too, as it saved my job when I showed up 60 miles and 2 hours later stinking like a brewery. In retrospect, I absolutely should have tried to parley that into a job at NASA.
university is an expensive waste of time…. unless :
You are going to study something scientific and use it as a platform for a life career…. (and have the discipline, interest and drive to go up the ladder in your field).
OR unless you really truly dig the subject and intend to become an academic….
OR you want to get in at the ground level in some major corporation and work your way up….
University is an absolute waste of time…….
If you are at all motivated and self disciplined which you have to be anyway to get a good degree, and have a little creative imagination and business sense…… then work for yourself… start a business, make your own mistakes and get a degree in the University of Life.
Most of the snobbery and drive to get kids onto college degree courses is simply to keep the unemployment numbers down…….
Who dares wins…. and University, especially a mediocre course in a questionable subject….. is just treading water in life…..
In addition to keeping the unemployment numbers down, near universal university attendance is a side effect of the credentialism of today. Nowadays, you have to hire the “most qualified” applicant, as defined by pieces of paper handed out by drones; lest some ambulance chaser starts taking a look at whether you have enough money that robbing you is worth his while.
I am lucky enough that, with the rate i’m going, my student loans will be paid off in another 20 months. (I started paying my loans off in July of 2011). Some people, however, -will- die with their student loan debt.
The whole “college graduate makes $1 million more than the non graduate” has been debunked a few times, and from the looks of things, it’s just getting worse.
60% of students take 6 years to get a 4-year degree. The more prestigious the school, the higher that percentage gets. Hopefully you’re not one of those students. Burn through school and get on with your life.
You don’t even have to remind yourself of abundance in college. Just open your fucking eyes.
I went back for alumni weekend last year and I’d forgotten how much eye candy there was. I hit it off with a girl, we parted ways, and I got her number. What I’d forgotten was, chances are, you will be forgotten by morning in that environment. There are just too many attractive people to put all your eggs in one basket.
My advice to myself would be: enjoy this variety. Appreciate doing double-takes at least 5 times a day. Because when you graduate, you’ll be lucky if you do one double-take a week. Appreciate not having to worry about bills, appreciate your friends (who will be harder to get together as the years go on), and appreciate the brass ring while you still have it.
Also, in your senior year…a girl named Jessica is going to text you at 3AM, wanting you to come over. Don’t put on your shoes and walk over to her place. She will go radio silent and you’ll feel like a jackass. Don’t feel bad that you never got to sleep with her. There are a million other, more willing and more beautiful, women. And the guy that did? That acquaintance that lives six houses away from you, he slept with her and got the herp.
” Don’t feel bad that you never got to sleep with her. There are a million other, more willing and more beautiful, women. And the guy that did? That acquaintance that lives six houses away from you, he slept with her and got the herp.”
There is a downside to college life today; rape culture, and fuckin’ ugly bitches who are contaminated with numerous STDs. And damned I was so put off the female presence of a university I recently visited; it was horrible. Almost every chick on campus could look 100% better if they didn’t allow themselves to get fat, or mutilate their features with piercings or hardcore ear gauges or tattoos.
And yes, today when you are banging today’s female campus girl, she is serving #5001, so enjoy all of her viruses and diseases gives you.
“Appreciate doing double-takes at least 5 times a day. Because when you graduate, you’ll be lucky if you do one double-take a week.”
That’s the one thing about the whole college mantra that was repeated indirectly to me in my college years: “Enjoy your life in college because when you get out and get a job, the fun ends, life gets more difficult, gets tedious, etc,.”
Translation: enjoy your college years, because those are the last years of fun before you have to enter into the matrix.
It’s important to remember this so you can avoid the matrix if you want to.
Yo. Me and a bunch of the exiled Slashfilm commenters created a channel. Most of the old gang is there. Bring it.
https://disqus.com/home/channel/slashfilminexodus/
Ha! What in the hell are you doing in here?? I’ll check it out for sure.
College is a waste for 95% of undergrads. There’s not much they teach in undergrad colleges that you can’t learn from a book. Think Goodwill Hunting.
If you want access to the latest technology, laboratories, and the guys who are discovering the latest and greatest things, then by all mean do the program so you can get to grad school, where you just begin to be taught by real professors, rather than grad assistants. But, plan on paying your dues at that level before you really get hands-on with the cool stuff.
Other than that, If you want access to the volume and types of women on a college campus, you don’t have to be enrolled there to troll the campus. Just consider the campus another venue, like a club, fully of day/night game opportunities. Whey drop five figures a year just to have an overnight crash pad. If fact, why not offer to subsidize a few of your college buddies at *various* schools in exchange for a overnight on-campus crash pad, should the need arise. It’s a lot cheaper than tuition and books.
What I’m saying is where there’s a will, there’s a way. Take the good parts of being on campus and having access to those girls, without having to pay the high price of admission. Spend your time developing yourself and your ability to earn income on your own, without the need for a college degree. That’s what I did back in the day, and have been very successful — both with money and the ladies — without having to show a diploma.
Depending on your subject :
– You won’t get girls to the same extend as a real university student.
– Reading books probably won’t give you the same knowledge an university student will get.
– If getting the same knowledge is possible, you’d have to spend at least as much time as them studying, doing it without getting the diploma would hurt my ass.
– If you choose your major well, it *will* pay for itself multiple times compared to someone who just read (even if many) books.
– You don’t know if you’ll manage to earn your own income, you did but those who won’t are fucked. I don’t like to rely on luck as much.
Damn, I wish I had read this my senior year of college. Now I’m on my way out of college with nothing to show for it, no new friends, and few memorable experiences.
Advice:
“don’t go, it’s a brainwashing facility like your K-12 years were”
“Young people had almost zero economic opportunities. Every now and then you’d hear of some youngish person who’d started a business. Michael Dell. Steve Jobs. But there were no entrepreneurs to be personally seen. If you wanted financial success, the ONLY routes were doctors and lawyers. Or inherit it. Or marry it. All other industries were locked up tight by protectionism, unions, licensing restrictions, and a thousand barriers to entry.”
You honestly think things have changed for the better? In fact it is far worse now than ever. Things are being consolidated so that more resources get controlled by fewer people. And when automation gets factored in, more jobs simply disappear as they get replaced by robots.
Let’s also factor in the crash of the dollar and the financial system and then see how much worse off things were in the past.