Me: Hi, I’m just letting you know that my parents are staying here one more day, so I’m gonna stay with them in their hotel tonight.
My first-year RA: Sounds good! Also, you didn’t need to tell me this.
“Sorry, we told everyone they needed to bring their own calculator. We don’t have extras,” the TA said to the guy sitting next to me. Luckily, I brought two. Proud of how prepared I was for my first college exam, I handed him my spare — then bombed the test.
I’d only been on campus a few weeks when a prospective student stopped me to ask how I was liking things. “Is there anything you’d change about the school?” they asked. “Ummmm,” I stalled, “In the dorms, they give us toilet paper, but they don’t give us trash bags. I wish they would so we didn’t have to pay for them.”
After a few months of working my first on-campus job, I emailed my boss to let her know I hadn’t gotten paid yet. She told me all the checks had been mailed. That was when I realized the third key they gave us at move-in was for a mailbox.
“I may be late, but at least I’m going,” I thought as I walked in 15 minutes late to my first-year Introductory Chemistry class. I marched to the front row, sat down, missed the chair, fell on the floor and died laughing as Professor Sunita paused her lecture to glare at me.
Calculus II, Midterm Exam 2 – Question 5: 1/10 pts. “Very very wrong approach called freshman’s dream.”
I was taking notes with one hand and checking emails with the other when I felt a tug on my phone. It was Professor Hendry. “You’ll get this back at the end of class,” He was mic’d. The lecture was being recorded. It was a 200-person class.
Enjoying my newfound college freedom, I ate an entire bag of Walmart-brand chocolate chips. I was sick for three days and missed an exam. My family calls it “the chocolate chip incident.”
I moved into my apartment during my junior year with no plans to furnish it because I thought it would make move-out easier. After a week of sleeping on the floor, I realized hardwood is really hard and ordered a bed.
When I ordered the tool kit for my new bed frame, I accidentally sent it to the wrong address. I had to walk to some random guy’s house and ask if he’d gotten my package. Thankfully, he had.
My friend Isabel came to visit me for the day. I got lost navigating us, so she didn’t see anything beyond campus. Instead of going to Fells Point, we spent the night watching movies on the floor of my apartment (because I didn’t have any furniture beyond a bed).
Later, my sister came to visit. She did the navigating, so we made it to Fells Point for lunch. We were walking around with our leftovers when a man on a bench looked at me and said, “Where’s my food? Hahahaha… Imma eat you.”
I was chatting with someone before class when my hard-of-hearing American Sign Language teacher walked in. He pointed at me, laughed and said, “I could hear your voice from down the hall.”
I locked myself out of my apartment every year except senior year. I’m officially ready for the real world.
Tess Gallegos is a senior graduating with a degree in Neuroscience from Magnolia, Texas.
