WHEN THE PARTY'S OVER PART 2

By Mary Rose Hokanson

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It was a rude awakening when a few months into my freshman year of college, I realized that I didn’t like college.

Looking back, I now know that I actually really like college, but what I didn’t like is the idea of college I thought I was supposed to be following.

Obviously, I knew that I was there to learn, but to me, college was supposed to be four years of not caring and going crazy before real life and adult responsibility takes you out of commission and sweeps all the fun out from under you.

But, what I quickly learned after a few months into college, living this life I thought I wanted, is that it’s not all it's cracked up to be. It only took a few months of fraternity basements, hopping around house parties, and these wild nights out that I was so excited for, to realize that I don’t actually like any of it as much as I thought I would.

I always thought that disliking college culture was an "outsider” mindset. I thought that any criticism of the college culture was just people who nobody wanted to hookup with saying that hookup culture is stupid.

But, there are valid criticisms of college culture and valid reasons why going out and getting hit on everywhere you go is not awesome.

Take parties for example: most people at parties have a goal in mind. Even if they don’t have fun, their reason to be there is to find a cute girl to talk to or a cute boy to talk to. They’re more likely to be social and talk to people they wouldn’t otherwise because they’re looking to hookup or meet someone. I don’t think like that, and I just wanted to enjoy myself so that didn’t always work for me.

But it extends beyond just parties.

Most of us in college evaluate others based on hierarchy of “what can YOU do for ME” and size people up based on how much we can use them for our own gain.

While this is a problem that affects all of college, I think this problem is exasperated when gender roles come into play. Both genders exploiting and using each other leaves everyone unhappy because the idea of character is completely lost on all of us.

What I wanted to dive into and look closer at in this episode, is character. I read a quote that said “Character is how you treat those who can do nothing for you.” I think about it almost every day.

How do you treat the people who can do absolutely nothing for you?

Going to an agriculture engineering school, we have a ton of weird people here. Am I going to be like everyone else and just tolerate them? Or should I actually regard others as more important than myself and recognize that every person has something to offer regardless of whether or not we can see it?

There is a quote by Carl Jung that says “everyone you meet knows something you don't know but need to know. Learn from them.”

It is much easier to write certain people off as worthless. It is much easier to believe that being kind to weird people you’ll probably never see again is a waste of time.

But this character is so important. In college culture, we often value someone's status or appearance as the most important thing about them. We will treat them according to what they can do for us and what they can offer to us. But I would argue that character is what makes someone have true value. Their character is more important than any of that.

The idea of character being lost on us is one of the reasons I avidly dislike hookup culture. Whether you’re a guy or a girl, as soon as you can’t be used by the other person you’ll be discarded.

It doesn’t make me feel empowered or respected, and I have learned that being my own advocate and setting this boundary is the best way that I can truly hold myself above all of the nonsense in college.

This decision is not always respected, but I don’t care.

The truth is that being a girl in college can suck. All of the attention you get non-stop can be exhausting and demeaning. The way boys will talk to you will make you feel sick and question if you want to go out ever again. They will try to take advantage of you every chance they get and things can get scary very fast.

For me at least, I had a hard time dealing with all of this at once and didn’t know what the right thing to do was. Standing my ground and standing up for myself seemed too scary until I actually did it, and then it was the best thing I ever learned.

I still do things differently than most people in college, but I embrace it. I don’t try to conform to the hookup culture, the college culture, whatever you want to call it. I have phases where I go to a party every single weekend and I have phases where I have no interest for weeks in a row. It’s all about making the most of my life here and trying to do right with my time I spend here.