Freshman year: It’s the year you will find your people, map out your future and finally become the person you always wanted to be.

At least, that’s what we are told.

I will never forget how I felt walking into my first college class. I was so nervous I felt sick, and I was halfway convinced I was lost.

The next class became easier because I knew what to expect, and after that week, I pretty much had a routine down. But it made me question certain things about myself: How do I appear to those around me? Will I actually be good at this?

My freshman experience was not nearly as groundbreaking as that of typical students. I don’t live on campus; I’m a townie.

I’m fully ignorant of what it would be like to sleep in a residence hall on the first night of my freshman year or have my primary food source be the dining hall and, most importantly, be without my family.

Though I have not had the normal freshman experience, living off campus has shown me a lot about what first-year students encounter.

As big as the University’s campus is, I will never be able to understand the overwhelming size, not only of the student body but also of campus. I did not leave home. 

But from where I stand, watching and participating at the edges of the first-year experience, the existential crisis seems to be a common occurrence for people.

For the students living on campus, that feeling must be even more intense. Being placed in a residence hall — with someone you very well may have never met — navigating shared spaces, making new routines, eating dining hall meals and so much more, I can’t relate.

In American media, we tend to talk about college in a very specific way; it is supposed to be transformative. College is the place to create yourself and become anew.

Think of “Gilmore Girls.” Rory works hard in the first three seasons to get into an Ivy League school. Her identity and most scenes she was in revolved around getting into Harvard University.

Once Rory leaves for college, that identity and expectation fracture because of a lack of structure. Her whole identity was focused on getting into college, and once she got to college, she didn’t have anything to work toward.

Similarly, I have seen University students with more freedom than they had ever experienced before and watched as their identities crumbled. No one told them who they were and where they ought to be.

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre offered a paradigm for this phenomenon. Sartre argued that “existence precedes essence,” which means that we are not born with a fixed identity or purpose. We exist first, then later define who we are through our choices.

That idea sounds empowering, but Sartre argued the opposite. He wrote that we are “condemned to be free.” In other words, we must create our identities in a world with no answers.

Freshman year is existential in my eyes. Freedom is the ability to choose and, by extension, the pressure to choose correctly, often without reassurance.

Like Rory, people enter college with these fixed identities that turn out to be a clean slate. The promise of “finding yourself” suggests that identity is hidden somewhere, and through some digging, you will eventually find what you’re looking for.

What freshman year has revealed to me is something much more uncomfortable than the regular narrative — there may be nothing to find yet. When there is no fixed self to uncover, one can only grieve and start to construct a new identity.

Mary-Audrey is a freshman in LAS.

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