All my life I have thought to myself......."self" I wonder why no one ever tells people this stuff (usually when I make a mistake). So I started The Clever Cynic...a place where someone actually tells you so you can not make the same mistakes. ;) I also try to steer my readers toward the best of the
Internet and entertainment and away from the stuff I found to be unpleasant.
If I had to give new college students just one piece of advice it would be to avoid living in the dorm at all cost, particularly: if you are someone who is very successful with the opposite sex, if you make friends easily, or if you are NORMAL. I lived in a dorm just long enough to learn: it is NOT a place I wanted to live, ever want to live again, or that I ever want to have to live again.
First of all, the minute you move into a dorm everyone becomes instantly OBSESSED with you, and for the wrong reasons. If you are successful with women, immediately all the guys become jealous and this leads to problems. If you have a roommate (most people do at least their first year until a single room becomes available) believe me it cramps your style. I personally don't favor social housing (i.e. anything with the Greek Alphabet anywhere near the name) because there are simply too many distractions. Besides I make friends easily, so I didn't feel I needed to pay extra to be guaranteed some. My first dorm experience was at a school without a Greek system and the idiots that I shared a floor with tried to "play" fraternity (including hazing). This was
enough to turn me off on dorms and communal living forever. I simply didn't have the time of money for such immature nonsense from a bunch of immature losers. I also had several girlfriends at the time...they had none...(the losers) and so guess who was the target of most of the hazing...sigh.
I had graduated from a huge metropolitan
high school that actually had three times the enrollment of the university I attended, so I had seen it all long before I ever entered college. I simply was not impressed by being out on my own. I had been free to go wherever I wanted all through
high school, so the last thing I needed was a bunch of immature upperclassmen who still were into middle school pranks, while they thought they were being "worldly."
Your goal when you enter a College or University is to obtain the credentials as fast as you can and get out and date as much as humanly possible without
interfering with the first goal. ;)
Why?
Because higher education is very expensive and I like women--a lot.;) Today many people have to borrow money via student loans--probably from several sources. Those eventually have to be repaid. Sure you may be able to consolidate your federal and private student loans for a lower interest rate when you graduate, but they eventually have to be repaid with INTEREST. Sometimes it takes a while to find a job when you first graduate and even if you find the best rate it still piles up. In fact I
recommend consolidating your student loans as soon as possible when you feel interest rates are the absolute lowest you will find. And yes they eventually have to be repaid if you ever want to be truly successful. The best way to wealth is to effectively manage credit. If you don't pay your bills your credit suffers ... a LOT.
Solution: Share an apartment off campus with other cool people. It can be much cheaper than the cost of a dorm, you have a place to stay in the summer and take advantage of summer programs without having to go home for the summer and if you can cook at all the food will be better, cheaper and cleaner. Summer courses are often much cheaper than regular semester rates so take advantage of the cost savings. If you plan right, you can finish a year early (saving yourself a year of full-cost tuition and gain a year of pay and experience instead), so plan early when you make out your schedules, plan to cover the courses that are not offered that much as soon as possible to get them out of the way. ENJOY college...avoiding the dorm is a good start.;)
--The Clever Cynic,
http://theclevercynic.blogspot.com/E-mail: the_clever_cynic@yahoo.com
