Sophomore year is a five on a scale of 1-10. It’s medium. Mediocre. Fine. Our training wheels have come off but we’re still wearing our helmets, no matter how embarrassing they may look. Our dorm fobs have been replaced by house keys, our parents’ incessant calls have decreased substantially and most of us are stuck between our last year as a teen and our first as a twenty.
This is the sophomore slump.
Here we sit, in the purgatory between baby and adult. Too young to complain about being irrelevant, but too old to act like we actually aren’t.
Freshman year — full of new experiences, messy mistakes and lessons learned — is behind us, with the beautiful mix of ignorance and bliss becoming a thing of the past. In front of us stands junior year, where classes get hard, relationships get serious and life after college becomes more of a reality than some scary myth no one talks about.
So where is our place as sophomores? How can we make sophomore year synonymous with something more meaningful than “slump?” How can we make our second year as college students one that is just as important, if not more, than the rest?
Sticking with the theme of alliteration, I propose two guiding ideas to help make year two worth remembering.
Spontaneity and Soul Searching
(I had to get creative)
It doesn’t take a genius to notice the monotonous, predictable ways of life around Gainesville. The sun will always rise and set, the activists in Turlington will always badger you as you walk to class and someone you know will always always be at the frat Publix hoping not to have an awkward run in (which they will, inevitably).
It was a Saturday of an away game that a small, glassy, shining light bulb appeared over my head. I was sitting on my friends couch as we debated whether or not we liked Instagram geotags when all of a sudden we noticed how actually pretty it was outside. We played with the idea of bringing our Chinese takeout to her balcony to enjoy the fresh air, but then decided we wanted to do something a bit more complex, a little more spontaneous.
But what?
Via: web.missouri.edu
After spending all of freshman year exploring the five by five mile radius of our campus, the farthest we’d ever gone to being adventurous was washing the x’s off our hands at Cantina, or going on a trip down Ginnie Springs.
It’s honestly embarrassing to admit that since living in Gainesville for over a year, we still have almost no knowledge of what lies beyond the Oaks Mall, or what comes after the Sai liquor store.
For instance, did you know that there are wild horses that run around Paynes Prairie? Yes, there are stallions galloping away a few miles outside of Norman, yet we choose to spend our free time contracting arthritis from swiping left and right.
Let us add a little adventure to our scheduled sophomore year and eliminate the possibility of it falling into an infamous slump. Obviously, this is easier said than done, seeing that spare time is usually spent sleeping, studying, Snapchatting or stalking social media. But with a full year ahead of us, a little spontaneity and adventure is just what sophomore year needs to keep it from being forgotten.
Via: nexttriptourism.com
This is our chance to get off the couch, delete Yik Yak, mute GroupMe and choose exploring and adventure over anything else. Gainesville is chock-full of little hidden gems. What better time to find them all than during your spontaneous second year in the swamp?
Sophomore year is yearning for those adventures, those explorations, those moments of meaning. You have an entire year to make sure where you’re headed in life is where you’d actually like to be going, to decide if the career you will be slaving over is actually what will make you happy. We can wonder what lies ahead of us all day long, but if there’s one thing we can find out for sure, it’s what were passionate about (and Rowdy’s basketball doesn’t count). You have choices, you have freedom and you have freshman year’s mistakes to keep you from slipping up too terribly.
It’s college, a time to experiment. A time to find yourself and then lose yourself quicker than the tides change in a game of golden tee golf (shout out Gator City). You’ve taken small steps but now it’s time to make bigger jumps. Do things that scare you, try things that you’ve never tried before and invent things that haven’t been thought of. The rest of your future could be banking on the fact that you have this entire year to find out what you love and what makes you happy.
Featured photo courtesy of: wallpaper2020.com
