Well I thought I might shell out some ideas and thoughts on how to transition smoothly from boarding school to college life because it can be quite a transition for many. I once made it myself and went into it not believing that there actually was a serious transition that I needed to be concerned about.

The main difference between college and boarding school is freedom. Every boarding school child has been waiting and yearning for the moment that they may be released from the chains and terrible tyranny of their educational institutions.

Well let me tell you that your dreams will be answered but freedom may not be exactly as great as you thought it was.

You will find in college that you will have an incredible amount of time on your hands. I don’t know what all those college counselors were harping about with all the studying I was going to be doing. I found that actually you don’t have to do very much studying at all. And when you do the solution is easy: take Ritalin and stay up for a couple days while you crunch out your work.

During the week and weekends you will probably find it helpful to begin smoking weed. As you will learn most college students enjoy a smoke before bedtime. It is also a well-known fact on many campuses that marijuana is actually the best hangover cure there is. Who would have known!

Besides smoking weed you may also find you will want to begin heavy drinking. I know peer pressure is for immature high school kids, so you will just be “enjoying cocktails” with friends an associates.

Many of you and your new friends at college may decide it would be wise to spend the first month of school drinking every night. You will have names for every night of the week like “wasted Wednesdays” and “blackout Tuesdays” very creative indeed. This may continue for as short as a couple weeks or up until everyone calls their parents and tells them how they had a very difficult time transitioning so the report card may not be up to standards. As time goes on some of you will stop and steady yourselves and some will continue right on.

The dorms that you live in you will find will quickly transition from the pristine shape they were in when you arrived with your parents, to something resembling that of a housing project, after a few weekends of drunken hallway wrestling and garbage can flipping (a few games many like to participate in).

You may find after weeks of partying and fun with your college friends that, actually you don’t really know much at all about them at all. This is when you will miss boarding school and you will miss all of your friends there quite a lot, but you won’t admit it that boarding school was as good as college you will have to wait some time for that.

Let me give you some suggestions that might help you to concentrate more on your studies so that you might get from college experience what your parents thought you were getting when they forked over thirty thousand dollars for it.

In boarding school you were always trying to sneak in free time, always trying to find moments to not have any commitments. Well in college you will find that you are actually searching for commitments and things to structure your time. Many of you will structure this time with smoking and drinking, but hopefully you will soon find that the rock star lifestyle is enjoyable but somewhat shallow.

I suggest that you don’t get to caught up in that lifestyle. Many do it for a while and than are easily able to transition to the working world. However many do it for a year and than another and than four more. They party until there is no one left to party with, and than they party with themselves holed up in cheap motel rooms with TV dinners and little baggies of weed because it was all they have done for so many years.

Well I suggest that you experiment, as you are willing to but don’t be too curious. If you really actually want to get an education and not just a slip of paper to certify your worth as another voiceless cog in the machine, I would suggest that you spend around four hours a day on your studies. Don’t fuss over what you need to get done, just spend a consistent four hours and what gets done gets done. Grades you will find are not what they were in high school, and are actually not all there harped up to be.

The professors, you may find are not much at all like your teachers in high school. When you try to schedule personal meetings with them they might laugh at you and assign you to the TA. In fact you might find that the professors actually like to have as little contact with the students as possible despite what all the glossy brochures said. Many of them are in the prime of their publishing careers and they are busy pursing prestige and recognition in the academic world.

Most of them will be openly bitter about their colleagues in their classes and getting any of them to agree on the most simplistic points you might find very difficult. Again here I suggest that you meet with the TA’s and show very little respect for professors who act in such a manner. You will put in the four hours a day irrespective of their non-sense.

Parents, you may find when your child comes home that he or she is quite different. If they attend a liberal arts school they may engage in constant social and political quarrels with their neo-conservative fathers. I suggest that you encourage your child’s new-found point of view even though your hoping that she doesn’t spread her thoughts to your other children. This where I encourage the parents to do a little learning of your own. Your children are studying now and you studied forty years ago. I suggest you give some thought to what they have to say.

Hope all goes well and good luck in your studies,