I’m going off to college and I’m afraid that I’m not going to like my dorm or my roommate or that I won’t make friends and that my experience will be awful and terrible.

What should I do?

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Going off to college can be scary, scarier than most people want to acknowledge or admit out loud.  College is often painted to be a party-filled, happy, carefree time.  Full stop.  Can it be fun?  Absolutely.  But is it just the best time of your life?  Almost never.  Going off to college is a time of intense change, and intense change is, by definition, stressful.

When you leave for college, you are often venturing away from your home for the first time.  You’ll be faced with all new decisions, and lots of them.  In high school, you likely had a very limited number of choices – courses are limited, our parents are setting rules for us, we are generally being cared for. Now you’re suddenly in a world where you not only get to decide everything for yourself, but you must decide everything for yourself. 

Especially if you’re parents tended to baby you, this can be very hard.  And let me tell you, I know that babying somebody can have a negative connotation, but that isn’t how I intend it here.  I am VERY guilty of babying my children and I’m very guilty of not babying them enough.  It depended on the day.  But if you love your children and want to take care of them, it’s natural to do a bit much at times.  This can be especially true right before they are leaving for college.  After all, us parents are experiencing our own version of this change at the very same time, so we’re often doing the best we can.  However, I digress.  Some parents baby their kids in what I’m going to call the “good” way – think doing their laundry, cooking their meals, cleaning their rooms, waking them up for school, maintaining their cars, making necessary phone calls for them, researching solutions to their problems and answers to their questions, etc.  Some parents baby their kids in the “bad” way – think having too many rules, insisting on a strict curfew, not allowing them to curse, restricting what they can spend their money on, restricting where they go and with whom, etc.  Many parents do a little of both.

Both forms of babying actually are, in their own way, expressions of love, but both types of babying keep kids from growing before they leave for college.  [To parents: Babying your kids also sends the likely unintended message that you don’t trust them to be able to handle their lives on their own.  Maybe you don’t, but they need to learn sometime, and better to learn while they are still at home than have to learn everything all at once. In fact, your job is to teach them how to start trusting themselves a little at a time.]

So whether or not you’ve truly been prepped to leave the house, off you’ll be, often with a lot more freedom and, correspondingly, a lot more responsibility.  I encourage you to see leaving for college as more of a ‘growing up and taking the next step in your life’ and less of a ‘breaking free to have the time of your life’.  In other words, don’t put the pressure on this experience to be anything in particular.  It is simply the next step in your life and like all steps there will be great things about it and there will not-so-great things about it.

[Note that all of these concepts apply to any big change or life transition, including moving, getting married, getting divorced, having a baby, retiring, etc.  All of these things carry with them some of the same internal pressures to have the time of your life.  But that’s not the way life works – every experience is a combination of both good and bad.  So keep that in  mind and shift your expectations to something more reasonable.]

But for now, because we are talking about college, let’s move on to roommates.  Learning how to navigate having a roommate sometimes sucks, can sometimes be fun, and is almost always challenging.  You’ll definitely learn something about yourself and about how to navigate getting along with other people.  You may have never even had to share a room with anyone until now.  But even if you have shared a room with a sibling, this will be a completely different experience.  You may be rooming with someone you don’t know at all or you might be rooming with someone you know a little or even a lot.  But it will still be challenging.  Despite what you think, very few people have an experience that is only amazing and great.  Even roommates who end up being friends forever will have their fair share of challenges, almost certainly.  They will likely disagree and even fight at times.  So make sure that your expectations are reasonable.

Having a roommate is way more intense than just interacting with people that you don’t have to sleep in the same room with every night, but you’ll still have to do this over and over for the rest of your life – meet people, learn what makes them tick, learn their quirks, find the good things about them and then figure out how to get along.  Try to see it as a rite of passage and resist the urge to put too much pressure on this one relationship!

If you make it your goal to have the perfect experience, you’ll be setting yourself up for failure.  Instead, set a realistic goal.  Make it your goal to make the best of whatever happens.  And then try to do just that.

If you go into your college experience with the mindset If my dorm and roommate are bad then college will be bad, and you end up not liking your roommate and/or dorm, then your belief that this makes college bad will absolutely make that true.  Because that is your mindset.  You have pre-decided it. 

If you go into your college experience with the mindset If my dorm and roommate are bad then I will go find people and experiences that I enjoy more, and you end up not liking your roommate and/or dorm,then, because of your belief, you will naturally shift your focus to other things that you do enjoy more.  You will believe that other more enjoyable things are out there waiting to be discovered, so you spend time looking for them. 

Now, I know you want a “good” experience, but also try to resist the urge to categorize things as good or bad.  Don’t treat anything in life (including experiences, people, jobs, etc.) as all one thing or another. 

Imagine you get a survey after a visit to a restaurant and they ask you to rate the restaurant as “good” or “bad.”  Honestly, when these are the only choices, many things will simply have to go in the “bad” category if any part of it was bad.  So look at things in a more nuanced way.  Likely your experience was somewhere in the middle.  [I don’t know about you but I prefer a lot of numbers of my scales.  I really don’t like rating things out of 5 stars – give me 10 or even more stars!] And we usually need a variety of categories on which to rate things.   For this restaurant instead of “good” or “bad”, you might rate the ambiance as a 7.3 out of 10, the service as a 9.1 out of 10, and the food as a 4.6 out of 10.  Not good (a 10), not bad (a 1), but somewhere in between. 

Let’s say that the reasonable “worst-case” scenario happens and you end up not really enjoying your experience in the dorm for your freshman year.  (The truth is that there are likely far worse “worst-case” scenarios, but for the sake of the argument let’s assume that you just have an overall bad experience rather than a catastrophic one.)  Maybe your roommate and you are only a 3.1 out of 10 compatible, your dorm room only earns a 2.7 out of 10 for beauty and comfort and a 4.1 for location.  Let’s just assume you just generally don’t like that part of your life that year. 

Fair enough.  Remember that usually our best stories in life come out of hardship and challenge – someday you will likely look back at this time in your life and even laugh about it.  How do you want to act while it is happening so that the character that is you shows up in your future stories as someone you can be proud of?  Think about that and then shift your focus to anything else that you do like.  Find other things in your life and college experience that you enjoy. 

The truth is that while you aren’t ever able to completely control your surroundings or how things play out around you, you do still get to make a lot of choices in your life.  And part of that is picking how you show up each and every day.  You have full power over that.

Also, remember to be kind and keep in mind that neither you nor your roommate will be perfect.  Look for things to like, rather than looking for things to not like.  Look for commonalities more than focusing on differences.  You are humans that are both experiencing all new things for the first time!  Cut yourself and the people around you some slack. 

Keep in mind that college is a great time to meet a lot of people, to experiment with yourself a little bit.   You might go into college believing that you love one thing and discover over the course of your time there that you actually are different than you thought.  I strongly encourage you to drop the preconceived notion of who you are, what you need and how things should go and just let yourself experience whatever comes your way.

You never know.  Maybe you’ve always thought you were an introvert, but you find you’re an extrovert.  Maybe you’ve always labeled yourself as neat, but you actually find yourself being messy.  Maybe you’ve thought of yourself as a morning person, but you become a night person.  Stay open – this is a time of discovery, a time to see who you are going to become.  [And this applies even to those of you not starting college – maybe you’re retiring, maybe you’re having a baby, maybe you’re getting married.  Not only do we always need to stay open to learning but we also (surprise, surprise) change over time!  Don’t keep yourself stuck with a label you assigned yourself (or, as is often the case, others assigned you) when you were a kid.]

Another important thing to remember is that you will never find a clone of yourself.  That might sound silly, but I have found throughout my life that I have, however inadvertently, ended up looking for this very thing.  Instead, do your best to celebrate differences.  Maybe your roommate will be quieter than you and they will bring more depth to your life.  Maybe your roommate will be quite a bit more social than you and they will bring you out of your shell.  Maybe your roommate will be a teetotaler and you will want to go crazy and drink, and they will keep you a little tamer than you otherwise would have been.  Maybe the opposite will be true – they will be a wild party animal, coming in at all hours of the night and morning and you will want to get sleep for your classes, and you will learn how to set boundaries and have difficult conversations.  No matter what, if your goal was to gain an experience, you will have done that by the end of your time with this roommate.

Not to mention that choosing a roommate looks a lot like dating and many, many people (in fact, most people) that we date don’t end up being our lifelong partners, our soulmates.  So don’t put that pressure on your roommate – it really is asking too much. 

Sure, maybe you can cite some examples where people lucked into their first college roommate being their bestie for life, and there are also people that marry their high school sweetheart and stay happily married for 75 years. But there is a whole range of people that get along well enough with their roommates, but aren’t actually soul mates.

You will be surrounded by so many new people and so many new experiences, that if you choose to focus in on the success or failure of your relationship with this single person, your freshman roommate, you will be simultaneously making the choice to miss out on a lot of other things.

So, this brings me to the most important thing that I can possibly tell you.  Maybe this sounds annoyingly trite.  In fact, I think that it does.  But guess who is the only person that can make your experience a good one?  Whether it’s college, marriage, having a baby, retiring, etc, the only person that has the power to make or break this experience is…you.

I wish I had learned this earlier in my life.  You need to bring your own light to situations.  It’s not about the people around you in the end.  So stop trying to control another person or an experience or hoping that you luck into the perfect situation or lamenting the way things are.  No matter what, you always have the power to choose how you show up.  You have the power to choose the next step.  You even always have the power to change course, even walk away if necessary.  But choosing to focus more on yourself and how you’re showing up, choosing to focus on your own mindset will get you a lot farther than wasting time wishing things were different.  [Importantly, this does NOT mean you should stay in truly bad situations.  In fact, it means the opposite – if you find yourself in a truly bad situation, stop trying to change the other person, and recognize when you need to remove yourself.]

We are taught not to be selfish, not to focus so much on ourselves, but then when we focus on other people, we are told that we can’t change other people.  The truth is that it’s okay to be a little selfish.  If being selfish is really just focusing on doing for yourself what you need to do and giving to yourself what you need, then I think it is the only responsible thing to do.  Not to mention that focusing on your self takes a lot of pressure off of those around you to be a certain thing or do a certain thing.  Once you do this, it’s easier to accept others just the way they are. 

After all, you literally cannot force another person to be a certain way and you literally cannot control experiences or make them pan out in certain ways.  All you have control over is you and how you choose to show up.  And if you’re able to meet your own needs you won’t feel the need to control the people around you.

On top of that, if you can master this art (and it is an art to stop needing to change others while also not becoming a hyper-loner), then you will naturally attract good things to yourself. 

Focus on yourself.  Be yourself without needing others to be anything different than what they are. 

Bring your own light.  Not so you can brighten the worlds of those around you but so you can brighten your own world.

I’m going to end with a story that I wrote to illustrate this idea.

The Girl Who Waited for Light

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in a very big house.

Some rooms were filled with sunlight. In those rooms, she danced and spun in circles through the golden squares on the floor, laughing and happy. 

But not all the rooms were bright.

Some were dim.
Some were shadowed.
And a few were so dark she could not see her own hands in front of her face.

Whenever she reached one of those rooms, she would stop at the threshold and call out,
“Can someone turn on the light for me?”

She waited.

She listened.

She hoped.

She cried.

She fumed.

But no one came.

So she stood there, small and still, afraid to move forward, afraid of the dark and certain that light was something that had to be given to her.

Again and again, she waited.

Again and again, she felt the same ache: Why won’t anyone help me?

One day, as she stood at the edge of yet another darkened room, tired of the waiting, tired of the wishing, angry that nobody was helping her, she had a thought.

What if I bring my own light?

Just as quickly, she pushed it away.

“I can’t,” she said aloud.
“That’s not how it works.”

So she called out again for help.
And she waited again.
But the darkness didn’t budge.

It seemed she had become fixated on these just-out-of-reach darkened rooms.

Until one day, as she again stood at the threshold of a room filled with darkness, the thought returned.

What if I bring my own light?

This time something inside her shifted.  It wasn’t loud or dramatic.  Instead it was more a simple shifting into place of something that had long been slightly askew.

It felt…right.

She knew what she had to do.

Returning to her bedroom, she dug through the closet until she found what she was looking for – a small lantern that had been there for as long as she could remember. 

It wasn’t fancy.
It wasn’t large.

It wasn’t overly bright.
But it was hers.

So she picked it up, and returned to the threshold of the darkened room where she had just been. 

And then she turned on the light and, with trembling hands, she stepped into the darkened room.

Just like that, the room was filled with magnificent light, light that she had brought, her own light.

And now she had opened up a whole new room. 

This once off-limits room was no longer dark and no longer scary, instead it was beautiful and magical.

She stood there, taking it all in, while a quiet realization settled into her bones.

She had never needed to wait.

She had never needed to cry out for someone to come along and turn on the light. 

She had the power this whole time.

From that day on, her world was larger. 

She still danced in the bright rooms.

But when she came to the dark ones, she no longer called out for help.

She carried her own light.

And wherever she went, the house felt different.

Not because the house had changed…but because she had.