College Dormitory Memories

Today I took my son and went to visit a former client of mine, who moved into her Freshman college dorm earlier this week. In my 11 years at my current position, this is the second youth that I have worked with that has actually gone to college. When I learned from my co-worker, that this magnificent young lady was attending college (I worked with her from '02-'07) and he had to meet her for the first time by the end of the month, I jumped at the opportunity to see her again!

College dormitories...to date myself, it was 16 years ago, I found myself a Freshman at the same college. While I wasn't in her specific dorm, the rooms, the hallway, the entrance were all too familiar. There had been visible upgrades - welcoming lobby with furniture, and more parking (although I couldn't find the visitor lot!) and then the reported - cafeteria open 24 hours in the dorm and a small gym in the dorm. The room was still stifling hot due to no air conditioning but the college now provides lofts, dressers and a table. Back in my day, I had to purchase a loft and used plastic book shelves and other makeshift "furniture" that only a college student could use or grow to love!

I only stayed in the dorm for one year. I had gone in "blind" for a roommate and managed to get a very nice roommate on opposite sleep schedules that lived 15 minutes from home and went home every weekend. A year or two later when I saw my first roommate again, I learned that maybe I wasn't such a good roommate afterall. She was my one and only female roommate, ever. I felt isolated that year, I spent as much time at my girlfriends college living her college life with her. I even considered transferring, but even she and I had very different paths.

I never fully embraced the whole college life. While I don't have regrets about things in life, only life lessons, if I could do it again, I would do it differently. I would embrace the experience!

Riding up on the stuffy, smelly, dirty elevator to her floor, I remembered all those years before. I looked at my son and suddenly I felt old. He said I wasn't that old. To be innocent and naive. I graduated college exactly three years after I first entered college that summer after high school when I moved into the college dorm. Oh how long ago that was.