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How to get over not having a good college experience? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm going into my last year of college and I kinda felt like I did college wrong. Like, my grades are good but everything else about college I failed at. Like socially and stuff, after 4 years I barely know anybody. I commuted(to avoid debt, and did so successfully) so maybe that's part of my problem.

But I feel college was supposed to be special time in your life and to me it has been indifferent. :/Thoughts?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Write down as much detail as you can about what you did wrong so that you don’t repeat the mistakes in the future.

Take what you wrote here about exactly and precisely you missed in college, and expand it to 10 pages.

Your overall goal is to cover in as much depth these topics:

Exactly what happened. The bare facts. “I went to college starting X date. I took XYZ classes. I lived X place. The weather was X.” etc etc.
What role your decisions played in that story. “I chose to get a bike, and that caused XYZ. When faced with decision A1 vs A2 I decided A2 because I thought blah blah. That resulted in X.” etc
What changes to behavior you can make going forward, to avoid the worst pitfalls in the previous experience

The only way to get over any negative life experience is to fully suck the well dry in terms of lessons learned. Any problem you encounter contains potential lessons that can help you avoid that same problem in the future. Life is long. As long as negative experiences are processed into wisdom, it works out to your benefit in the end.

But you have to perform the extraction. Performing the extraction means doing the writing. A lot of writing. As much as you can really. The more details you scrape out in your written exploration, the more completely the extraction is done.

When the experience has been totally drained of potential lessons — when you’ve articulated them all — you will be (and most importantly you will feel) over it.

That’s how you get over a mistake in life. It never goes away. It will always be in your past. But if process it, it shines as a source of good in your past, becomes something you’re proud of, because now the event consists of the fused union of the event and the lessons you learned, and those lessons are valuable enough to make it worth it.

Until you do that, you’ve got all event and no lessons, and it will feel shameful and dark in your memory.