5 Fresh Personalities To Try Out Your Freshman Year Of College
Change can be a very difficult thing, especially relatively early on in your life. You’re still trying to figure out if you actually like electronic music or if it just stimulates your chaotic young brain, and trying to decide if you’re going to stick with your parents’ politics or find a new worldview from your YouTube sidebar. Add in a change of scenery and the first time living on your own and it can throw your self-identity into a full-blown crisis. That’s why the freshman year of college can be such a confusing and tumultuous time. You have the anxiety of an adult, but without the dulling of the senses caused by a couple years spent alone, raw-dogging the grind of the human experience.
With all that, you can be left reeling as you show up to campus for your first year, wondering exactly who you want to be. Luckily for you, there’s a simple solution, offered by the chaotic nature of thousands of 18-21 year olds all attempting to decode themselves while also making it to most of their classes. That freedom is that you can just choose a whole new personality, and try it out for a year before making any further decision. Even if you’re an absolute toadstool of a person, you’ll be forever able to dismiss it away as a “phase.” It’s like a whole year of emotional Halloween!
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Here’s 5 whole new personality types to take for a test drive your first year of college.
World Traveler
Want to seem worldly, a student of the earth, despite not owning a passport or parents that summer in Monaco? No problem. The solution here is to devote yourself completely to infatuation with foreign countries, with two specific caveats: first, it has to be primarily first-world, eurocentric countries. Secondly, you have to learn about them only on the most skin-deep, outward level. Basically, you want to be a walking brochure.
Build an amalgamation of yourself from facets of other countries that are so obvious as to be borderline stereotypical. Don’t learn about their history or any possible downside or struggles within them, just pick like 2 musicians or authors from each, and then constantly bring yourself to the verge of tears that you’re stuck with the unwashed heathens of the United States. There’s plenty of reasons to not like the U.S., like our backwards healthcare system or functional oligarchy, but those aren’t your concern. You should be more mad about how our sitcoms run too many seasons versus the UK, or that good bread isn’t as available as in France, or whatever.
Street Style Blogger
You own your own IKEA dresser now, and that’s exciting! You can fill it with whatever clothes you want, and leave your dorm room without having to angrily explain to a father that loves you that he doesn’t get fashion. Now you can pursue an aim of being imminently instagrammable, at least in your mind. You can be the best-dressed person on a college campus, which is like being the best-behaved person in an asylum for the criminally insane.
One of the most important things to know here is that you make it exceedingly clear that you are dialed into fashion. The more items you can hang off your body like a dinner party coat rack, the better. If someone would be impressed by your giant felt hat, imagine how impressed they’ll be when they look down and realize you’re ALSO wearing massive calf-length athleisure high-tops. If you look like you covered yourself in glue and then rolled around in a Fashion Week lost and found, you’re doing it right.
Contrarian
Agreeing with people might make you friends and a pleasant conversationalist, but it runs the risk of a group of people losing focus on you, and your magnificent brain. Every opinion you don’t disagree with is a missed opportunity to demonstrate your uniqueness. You learned the term “devil’s advocate” over the summer, and it would be a waste not to use it to its fullest extent. It’s important for every cafeteria lunch to feel like debate club.
You’ll find that after many of your contributions to a conversation, there will be a long pause as your friends’ worldview changes and develops. You did that! Congratulations. You may even see them exchanging glances, communicating to each other non-verbally, “wow, it is truly enlightening to be in the presence of a modern-day philosopher.” Once you’ve gotten comfortably with your peers, you can bring your new viewpoints to your professors, preferably in the middle of a lecture. They might have a doctorate in foreign policy, but you’ve got an unconventional worldview, and a smooth young hand to raise in a way that’s both casual but insistent.
Old Soul
You’re very mature for your age. Some might say this is undiagnosed clinical depression, but they don’t understand that you’re just an old soul. For example, you do things old people do, like read, and enjoy the changing leaves. You lament to no one in particular about the lack of a good wine bar in your college town. When you begrudgingly settle for your local sports bar, you order old, mature drinks, like Evan Williams on the rocks.
This is likely the last period in your life where you aren’t suspended under the crushing weight of adult responsibility like paying for your own health insurance or knowing your cholesterol numbers, but you should wallow in misery like a war veteran who came home to a broken marriage. People just don’t understand how your mind works, the same way they don’t understand how much you actually have in common with your 32-year-old significant other who’s never had a partner that could rent a car by themselves.
Psychonaut
You’re in college to expand your mind, right, man? Well, those other jabronis can splash around in the wading pool of books and classwork, but you’re diving right into the deep end. Find out what salvia is on your first day and talk about it for the next three hundred and sixty-five. Welcome to the home of next-level thinking, have a seat right there underneath the Hunter S. Thompson poster. You were worried about getting a good grade on your mid-terms, but then DMT reminded you that we’re all stardust. You have two best friends and you know their greatest existential fear but not their hometown.
Pick one and have fun! After all, do whatever you want in college, you’re young and have the whole world ahead of you, so who cares if a bitter mid-30s internet writer thinks. He’s balding!
