Hell, it was the early-mid 1990s, and my huge university had this dial-in system for registering for classes. Each semester, they varied what block of the alphabet registered on which days. It was something like Seniors with last names starting I-P registered on Monday starting at 5 am, Seniors with last names with A-H on Tuesday at 5 am, and Seniors with R-Z on Wednesday at 5 am. Then Juniors I-P on Thursday at 5 am, Juniors A-H on Friday at 5 am, and so on.
For your first couple of years, it was like 3D Tetris to try and figure out how many possible schedules of classes that fit your degree plan and got your prerequisites out of the way, added up to a full course load of 14-16 hours, and also met any other requirements, because there was a fair chance that all the sections of your preferred class would be full, or that the only one left was at 8 am, or whatever. It got better as you progressed, in that the number of students related to the number of sections in upper level classes in your major was usually lower (i.e. there was always space). But for stuff like intro Calculus or Chemistry? Better be flexible.
Oh man, that takes me back! It would be 1:00AM and I’d be sitting at one of the terminals in the computer lab closest to my dorm, and I would be praying that I would be able to get into the system so I could snatch the last seat of whatever course I believed I just had to get into (or else I would surely die). They gave everyone a time ticket, but a time ticket didn’t guarantee that you’d be able to log in. There was much gnashing of teeth as you waited for an opening. Because the athletes got to register before everyone, I would picture all the football players taking all the classes I was interested in and get mad. Bad times, bad times…
Oh, ours wasn’t even at a terminal. It was one of those terrible phone-tree things, where you’d dial in, enter your credentials (student ID number and PIN, IIRC), and then you had to enter a specific numeric code for each class/section- like it would be “83245” for ECON 302, and “301” for class section 302 at 10 am M/W/F. Then it would say something like “Section 302 is not available”, and you’d have to try again.
Eventually you’d get some sort of half-assedly workable schedule out of it, but in general, everyone had to do some later year rejiggering of their schedules. I imagine if someone was hell-bent on graduating in the least possible amount of time, the system would probably not allow that, as you couldn’t arrange your classes in your first two years just-so to enable that.
That was also (in the spirit of the OP), one of the points when I realized that the world wasn’t fair and didn’t give a shit about me- it would impartially and impersonally do its thing, and whether or not it conformed to what I wanted was entirely beside the point.
I forgot other people had that issue with registration. At my college all of the athletes registered first. So senior athletes then juniors and so on. Even as a freshmen I registered before all of the seniors who weren’t athletes so I always got the classes I needed at the time I needed. In theory it was because I had to be in pre-practice starting at 3 pm and I had morning practice through 8 am so I had less times I could take classes than a normal student.
That pretty much describes my experience. With nobody to push me, I failed dismally in my first semester and was told to take my sorry ass elsewhere. I spent a semester going to night school to get my GPA up a bit and was able to reenter the university on probation the next semester.
The other thing that dawned on me was that I didn’t have to carry my high school perception of myself onward in life. You know, that whole thing with your identity being defined by how others treated you? I could be whomever I wished to be, as very few people at the university knew me, and I was able to let my confidence grow a bit and shuck the crippling shyness. As a result, I started having to drive the girls away with a stick, not that I tried all that hard.
I came from a crazy family, so that was the greatest factor in my life experiences at that age.
In middle school (seventh and eight grades) I had a 3.9 GPA with gym as the only class less than an A. As a bookworm from my earliest memories, I couldn’t throw a ball for the life of me.
The pressure from my father was too intense. The pressure was not to get a perfect GPA, which may be what people would expect, but rather my father couldn’t allow family members to succeed or feel good about themselves. He used the excuse that I was “too proud” of my success, and the abuse each time a report card came home got too overwhelming so in the summer before high school I decided to just lower my grades to get Bs. That apparently was fine with him.
I got reset in university, and started off the same way, with a GPA in my first year that qualified me for an award (with money!) from the engineering department. Unfortunately, as the classes got more difficult, simply showing up to class and listening wasn’t sufficient enough and I had piss poor habits as well the ongoing anxiety related to the conflicting fears of both success and failure lead to a final B+ average.
High school was less of a transition as it was basically the same people I’ve known off and on since 3rd grade. Basically typical small-town suburban high school experience. TV and movies always sort of portray people having the same circle of friends more or less from grade school through graduation, but I found it tended to shift a lot from year to year as people developed at different rates or found different interests like sports or drugs.
College was kind of a big transition. Probably the biggest one was the social scene. Where in high school, you still knew all your freshman classmates and probably a lot of the upperclassmen too from middle school, college I didn’t know anyone. And my roommate sucked. Best thing about him was he’d go home every weekend. Also fraternities were huge and there wasn’t much else to do at my college if you weren’t an athlete. Corollary to that was drinking was also huge (and free). Generally what happened was freshmen lived in designated freshman dorms. The following year they either moved into whatever fraternity or sorority they pledged or they moved off campus with a couple of roommates.
So right from the start I kind of felt like there was this overwhelming pressure to formalize a group of friends (and I wasn’t really into the fraternity scene at that point (although I eventually joined one), nor did I particularly care for my hall mates.
If anything, college felt MORE cliquey with more “bullying” than I’d previously seen. Plus with the constant partying I nearly failed out.
By the end of sophomore year I figured most of it out though.
The one thing that was kind of unique was the concept of “cocktail parties”. From 7pm to 9pm before the more traditional keg parties, some fraternities would throw cocktail parties like pretentious yuppie kids. Men dress in jacket and tie (or sometimes a buffoonish counter-culture version such as jacket and tie with cargo pants and Birkenstocks) while women wear party dresses and we serve mixed drinks. Simple stuff like gin and tonics or screwdrivers. Maybe some shitty wine. We didn’t take it all that seriously. Mostly it was just another occasion to get drunk (along with keg parties, Thursday night hotel parties, theme parties, football tailgates, Monday Night Football, Beirut tournaments or no reason in particular).
To me, the biggest difference between high school and post-high-school is that you are responsible for all of the decisions. In HS, you pick what classes you sign up for, but you’re required to be in school all day and have to take a bunch of certain ones, so you mostly just sign up for the right difficulty level, some electives you like, and just keep going to classes and doing assignments until graduation. In college and in the job market, you don’t have a clear-cut ‘here’s what you do’ path - you have to decide on a degree yourself, and figure out what courses you need, and how to pass them - it’s easy to just skip class and hang out if you want to and blow off assignments. In the job market it’s even more open, and it can be unclear that something is even an option - do you start your own business, do contract work, apply for this job, get this cert, and so on. Your parents might give advice, but a lot of their advice is decades out of date so might not even be good anymore.
It’s definitely a big change, and was very strange to adjust to.
I had a friend with exactly the opposite problem. She was taking her last couple of credits over a summer, and realized she was going to fail the Spanish class so stopped bothering with it. Her plan was just to retake it in the fall because she was living in student housing with a student job and continuing to do that would work nicely. The teacher took pity on her and actually gave her a passing grade, which qualified her for graduation, and disqualified her from her housing and job plans, so she had to scramble to get things set up.
I went to an all-academic HS where nearly everyone went on to college. My class standing was 13% and SATs around 1300 which were not enough for a merit scholarship, the only kind we had in those bygone days. But I found a job in as a lab tecchie at one of the universities which allowed me to enroll as a part-time student. As an employee, half the tuition was waived and I earned enough to pay the other half while living at home. But I heard other students say what a shock was the difference between HS and college. I didn’t find it so. It seemed at about the same level of difficulty, so my HS prepared me for it. The lab had arranged things so that I could graduate in 5 years, but after 3 I did manage to get enough scholarship to finish in another year and a half. Then I got a PhD in 3 1/2 years so it was exactly 8 years from start to finish.
College was so far and above better than high school there’s just no comparison. I was the school slut in my high school (despite not having done the fun things they said I’d done to “deserve” it) and was pretty much a total and complete pariah. Then I went to college and was able to reinvent myself entirely.
Also, my mom never expected much of me except to become a housewife and stay-at-home mom and was a little put out when I decided to not only get a bachelor’s but a master’s too, so being in college really gave me an opportunity to redefine what was good work and what wasn’t. I went to a merit-based high school, but mom didn’t expect much. I’m pretty sure she sent it there to be able to say her kids were smart than any assumption that we were or that it mattered. Going to college really helped me get my crap together.
Now that I’m older and observing my own son in high school, I wish that I were learning some of the same stuff he is only at my current age rather than in high school. It’s way more interesting when I’m not slogging through it for a grade. And I look forward to him going to college - not for me (I’ll be devastated), but for him. Getting out of the house and having the freedom to manage himself will be so good for him. My husband and I love our kids, but overlyhusband can be helicopter-y.