Truthfully, we didn’t often visit the majestic land of music, light and laughter that roars to life just north of Grand River Avenue nearly every night. Most nights resembled this one: the two of us pouring over schoolwork, exchanging music and playing cards. The posed question made that all feel empty. After all, we have just a handful of years of attendance at Michigan State.

Then what? Maybe a job, house and family — the real world.

Life as an undergraduate college student is life in an exciting, temporary bubble, where life after the bubble is visible but unimaginably different. The extracurricular opportunities, academic options, lifestyle and going out to parties quite obviously will never again resemble what they do as an undergraduate student in college.

There is a very real, often unspoken, anxiety among many students. No one wants to don their cap and gown on glorious graduation day and feel like they missed something — like they didn’t get as much out of the college experience as they should have.

I will be the first to admit, the mere thought of misusing “the best years of our lives” is terrifying.
“Do you think we go out enough?”

The question came into focus again. For a momentary glimpse, the university around me sprawled out as a twisted, realized imagination of what college student life is supposed to look like. The brick, food-producing and student-storing dorms transformed to two story houses on Maple Drive, surrounded by white-picket fences. My roommate asking the question was suddenly Theodore “The Beaver” Cleaver asking if I thought his room was clean enough to go over to a friend’s house. As the question hung in the air between us, my mind whirled; we had become something we were not. We were suburbanized America attempting to mimic a reality that had never existed.

Just as with the 1960s suburbanization movement that was the topic of study in my classes, college life created a constant duality between perceived lifestyle and realized lifestyle.

Everyone wants to get the college experience. The dazzlingly-exciting lives presented in “Van Wilder” and “Old School” contained equally vivid preconceptions of college as the accomplishments in “The Social Network.”

Aren’t the stories I have after graduation supposed to be too crazy to tell my future kids, yet also be the years that make me into the professional I want to be?

Then the imagined, picturesque suburbia was gone. I was back in my dorm. The unanswered question was mocked by the free, wailing strings of Hendrix that my roommate’s laptop emitted to fill the silence between us.

“Do you think we go out enough?”

My college experience was nearly half over. I began to think of the moments that meant the most to me.

I remembered my first night on campus. I took a solitary walk that night through the W.J. Beal Botanical Gardens. I remember the euphoric feeling of liberation that washed over me when I realized I would never have to go back to my hometown again if I didn’t want to.

I thought of the kid with the peanut butter in the toaster. The cafeteria was receiving its annual influx of freshmen, including me — who sat nervously by myself in a booth.

From my vantage point, I could see a young man trying to put a piece of bread already smeared with peanut butter into a surely terrified toaster. I still chuckle remembering his embarrassed, scanning look of traumatic unpreparedness when he realized he had done something wrong enough to warrant smoke and a manager’s disdain.

Sitting in the cafeteria, I marveled at the self-sufficiency a mix of thoughtful parenting and economic disadvantage had blessed me with. I could toast and butter bread.

I remember feeling for the first time that I knew I was going to make it.

The memory of meeting my girlfriend came rushing back to me. The anxiety of the first conversation. The gratification of shared interest. The joy that constant connection brings.

“Do you think we go out enough?”

The question didn’t need an answer. In our silent reflection of what mattered to us in our years as undergraduate students, we each had answered the question for ourselves.

There is no correct amount to go out, no movies to tell how college life should be and the only narrative that needs to unfold is the one that offers fulfillment.

I’m sure my roommate’s prominent memories didn’t include a liberating bench, peanut butter in a toaster or my girlfriend (better not, at least), but his look told me he, as we all could, thought of something.

Tyler Gross is a guest columnist at The State News and a social relations and policy junior. Reach him at grosstyl@msu.edu.