The Life of a Campus Student

First year is always a haze. From all the excitement, buzz, zeal and generally fast paced activities, a first year is always a “fresha.” Fresh out of high school, still thinking of how university is an escape into a free world. Freedom is the first thing that they envision. Imagination takes the best of them considering they spent more than four months watching movies about sororities and all, so they come expecting that the hostels in campus will be all fun and games.

The first shocker comes in when you are required to be bunk mates with other guys you hardly know. In high school, I bet it was easy to just walk around in your towel and rush to dry bath, however in campus, it gets difficult somehow. Probably because the girls’ hostel is just nearby and one or two will always come by the shower and stare at your bones.

The booze, parties, night outs, meetups and what have you. Freedom is what they cried for and they get it in abundance. They go out when they want and only when the parents send money for “study books.” Class life is also not that too serious. You form a clique with your closest mates which definitely has to be old high school buddies. You spend your time in packs like hungry wolves always hunting. By this time, the true hyena nature has not formed, if you know what I mean.

Second year, things get easier. The girls, the parties and the life. Studies also get handled in style. You have already learned the ropes and you are Tarzan in the jungle. You start knowing who is who and association is better than independence. House parties are now the norm and here you feel a new. You look reborn. It’s like guys grow a pair while the girls go wild. The dressing even changes. You now subscribe to the who is who in the fashion industry, donning the Gucci and DnG ditching your Sunday best Polo and Ralph Lauren.

Many get into relationships but I call them convenience-ships. Oh yes, I do. You will probably fall in love with that girl you have been eyeing over the past semester, and if you grow a pair, I bet you will talk to your crush. Funny how the ultimate disappointment is when your crush says she’s been eyeing you all along too then you decide to date and realize that she is a goddess on the outside and a devil imp on the inside.

Third year, you realize that school needs to be taken care of. Political ambitions start kicking in. For ladies, the spotlight has never looked so achievable. You get a call here and there asking you to model. Confidence betrays you but you would rather walk the talk considering all your friends think you have the body of a model. We end up missing more classes than we expected. See, this is the time you realize that your dreams are fleeting and you’d better catch up with them soon enough.

The lectures get boring and so do you. Parties ever the more are still your cup of tea but now you are accustomed to bigger and more glam. Then the dilemma hits. If you have your wit about you, you will always end up making the right decisions. You find yourself thinking about life after school. For those who get lucky to see the job market in their internships, they understand that you need more than just a piece of paper saying you graduated, granted summa cum laude. You experience the aspirin and vitamin effect where you need vitamins just as a supplementary but you need an aspirin more because it kills pain. So this means you either don’t get supplementary exams at all or you get a couple but the biggest pain of all, is when you decide to go out and do business.

Fourth year, you realize your time is up. This is in case you did not drop out to pursue your entrepreneurship dreams. You start reading frantically trying to catch up with the serious guys. You attend lectures with utmost diligence like a priest that attends to mass. Grades go up but the party life stays down. See how the two are interconnected. You must be street smart to know how to balance the party animal inside you and the academic bubbling in your head.

You become so serious that your project looks like something straight off Harvard. Nonetheless, you have fun but in limited measure. Your girlfriend is no more and you have fully developed into a hapless hyena or a sore romantic. For the lucky few, they are endorsed with wives. Life looks good, a bed of roses they say. You complete your studies with a lot of good, bad and ugly memories. Now we wait for the graduation date, where the merry making of the whole of your village will bring a whole town to a halt. Then we think that jobs will come knocking on your door. What a life! The life of a campus student.