Freshman year on social media versus real life

“College is the time of your life.”

“I wish I could go back, don’t you just wish you could go back?!”

“First year college student — oh my god, it’s the best!”

These are the voices you hear echoing in your head as you’re trying to get adjusted.

The voice of your mom’s best friend with the heavy East Coast accent, the voice of your grandpa reminiscing on his glory days, the voice of the recent college grad trying to live vicariously through you — “college, college, college!”

Society makes it difficult to have your own, independent ideas sometimes — always putting pressure on you to think like everyone else. In my mere 19 years, the pressure to be the perfect “college freshman” is one of the most prominent I’ve come across.

College is about meeting new people every day. It’s about getting out of your comfort zone, trying new things that could become your passion. It’s about partying, studying and partying some more. It’s about eating pepperoni pizza at 3 a.m., exploring new cities at the brink of dawn, falling in and out of love and no one telling you what to do.

That all sounds pretty great, and it should be great. It only took you seven tutors, 81 practice tests, three SATs, two ACTs and 11 drafts of your “personal statement” to get here.

But realistically it doesn’t happen so fast. You’re not having the time of your life the second you arrive. Like anything, it takes a little time. Most likely you’re coming from a place you’ve been your entire life — where you’ve finally gotten comfortable. Then, right when you don’t feel completely awkward in high school anymore, you’re throwing off your graduation cap and shoved into a new city with unfamiliar faces. Suddenly you have no idea where anything is, and you’re expected to just go.

And not just “go,” but to be the perfect specimen of a human. You’re expected to be doing well in all your classes, to have joined a sorority or fraternity, to have made tons of friends, to act like an adult and to have the time of your life because I mean it’s college, the best time of your life!

This is where the social media comes into play.

Every college freshman does it. I myself am not exempt. Go check any of our Instagrams, Snapchats, Facebook profiles, and on some level, I promise you it will be present.

It’s the, “Oh my god, look everyone, I’m having so much fun just like you said I would, I’m so well adjusted and perfectly comfortable already!” post.

Whether you’re tearing up the streets of the Big Apple at NYU, at some small liberal arts college on the East Coast, “going blue,” or “going greek,” at the big M, or fighting on at ’SC, we all obviously need to remind the rest of society, each other and, most importantly, ourselves just how much fun we’re having.

It’s the new profile picture of you carelessly lying in a freshly mowed lawn, sunglasses on, or the snap story of the sunset on your newly renovated campus. It’s the Instagram of us here on game day at ’SC (or Berkeley, or Wiscosin or Michigan) dancing on a table, game day gear on with all of your new best friends. #Bestdayever when all you really want to do is tweet @collegestudent, “Where do I go in college to hysterically cry?”

It’s a natural human instinct to only put forth your best self on social media. It’s another way for us to make sure everyone knows “yes, I’m having a good time, I made the right choice, I am okay.”

However. even if we are having a great time at school, social media is literally and figuratively behind a filter. It’s not what any of our lives look like up close and personal.

We all probably spent a little too long trying to figure out how to work the washing machines the first time we had to do our laundry, or have been more than a couple minutes late to class because we couldn’t find the building.

On some level, we all have no idea what we’re doing. So we’re probably all going to keep posting our photos and making it seem like we have all our acts together. In reality, we might not, but soon enough we will, and we may actually feel as content and in place as social media makes you think we are.

Until then, fight on.