There comes a moment where you stop thinking of your life in terms of possibilities, and begin seeing life as a set of limitations. This is the transition into the “real world.” It usually happens after college graduation.
The shiny college brochure, which featured smiling faces and architecture of questionable taste and considerable cost, told you all about exciting worlds that awaited you. You could become an empowered traveler to lucrative destinations, with a college diploma from this institution as your passport. Yes, success was imminent, nay, inevitable! Your mind plus their rubber stamp and voila! Your dreams would come true.
College brochures are full of the most damnable lies, more damaging to young minds than Disney fairy tales.
I would have found it extremely helpful to have found the following nuggets of wisdom nestled somewhere between the map of campus and “Exciting careers with your major in Psychology!”
-- The only people that want to see you succeed are your parents. They’ve put up a lot of cash, and they would like a return on their investment. No one else cares, at best. Worst case scenario, others see you as a threat and will sooner actively undermine your success than lend you a neighborly helping hand in the workplace.
-- Thanks to the plummeting educational standards in America, the Bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma. It doesn’t put you anywhere near the top of the heap – it only prevents you from falling to the very bottom. Maybe. You might still end up flipping burgers or waiting tables indefinitely, depending on how much you counted on your college degree to be the all-access pass to success.
-- You are paying for college. Like a whore raving about a man’s miserable performance in bed, the school and those on its payroll are going to tell you whatever you want to hear in order to keep you there paying 20k a semester. Your grades are these lies, and you should ignore them. Just make sure you are learning something useful, like reading and writing and how to intimidate the bitches in the student accounts office. Otherwise, it will be a very rude awakening when you leave college and expect people to pay you.
-- Don’t get fat. Appearances aren’t everything, but damn if they don’t come in very helpful in the high stakes world. If you let yourself gain the freshman 15 (or 30, or 50, or whatever it is now), you will probably never get rid of it. And ladies: smart, hardworking girls don’t always get hired and subsequently promoted – smart, hardworking girls who look sexy in a skirt and heels do. And if you don’t let yourself go at 20, you’ll still have the rich husband backup plan available to you for many years to come. Finally, men spend money on attractive girls; those hours on the elliptical will pay off in the form of free dinners and drinks.
-- Your professors are extremely liberal because they work in the ivory tower and have something called tenure; i.e., they don’t have to give a shit about how the real world works. You may as well avoid embracing liberal ideas and liberal causes while you’re in school, because you will stop being an enthusiastic Democrat after graduation.* This will happen when you get your first paycheck and see what has been taken out of it in taxes, and you realize this money is going toward paying the welfare check of the family next door to your apartment in the ghetto. The ones who sit at home all day smoking pot, listening to rap, and letting their babies run around a dirty porch without clothes or diapers. You will realize that if you didn’t have to help buy McDonald's for these reefers and their offspring, you could afford an apartment that wasn’t in the ghetto.
*You may not have this realization if your parents don’t immediately cut you off financially. In which case you will become a hipster, fighting for the rights of the ignorant to have their unemployment subsidized by the taxation of your upper-middle-class parents.