UCLA. Voted “Hottest Mega-University” by Newsweek magazine. Most applied to university in America. One hundred NCAA team championships and counting, more than any other university to date.
As an incoming freshman, these were a few among many great things I heard about at the University of California, Los Angeles when I submitted my UC application at 5:54 a.m. on Nov. 30 of my senior year.
But with the high school phase ending three months ago and now moving forward onto the college phase, there are many things I look forward to as a first-year college student and moreover as a Bruin: meeting new people; exploring the numerous educational and non-school-related opportunities at UCLA, Westwood, and the surrounding area; and living in my own place and making my own choices with greater freedom than just being able to vote when you turn 18, where parents don’t nag at you for doing this and that.
On the other hand, those same aspects of college life leave me petrified: Friends from high school for the most part have gone to different colleges. UCLA and Los Angeles have become a bigger world than my high school and the city I grew up in. And the choices I make have repercussions and consequences that become greater with increased freedom.
Yet I was enlightened by a fact that made me quite thankful for being a college student. I was told only recently that college students are extremely rich.
Now my thoughts were more along the lines that college students, for the most part, are not that wealthy (not counting our friends at ‘SC, of course). But as college students, I realized that we have the most time to spend doing whatever we want compared to any other time of our life.
Previously, elementary and high school classes were set from 8 to 3, Monday through Friday, with slight variations for different schools. And in the real world of careers and occupations after college, the hours are again standardized with some form of a 9-to-5 workday schedule.
Never again will we have such an abundance of time at our discretion as in our college years. True, the college phase of life requires that we study more than we did in grade school, and there are additional responsibilities of laundry and things like that. But after classes and studying and all our involuntary “chores,” we would still have so much time to do whatever we wished.
So my wealth in time is one thing I really look forward to as a college student here at UCLA.
Uy is a first-year biology student.