When imagining the ideal college experience, one often pictures a campus with housing and classroom buildings intermingled and harmoniously connected by pathways adorned with patches of grass where friends meet up to study. One pictures school spirit, mascots, sports and other staples of college life. The idea of graduating high school and heading to a university not too far from home seems like the right next step in life. On the other hand, some may find the plot of Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film, “Lady Bird,” familiar. This film follows a high school girl and her romanticized dream of packing up a few suitcases to leave behind her hometown and start anew in a big city.
As someone with a first-hand experience of the “Lady Bird effect,” I can confirm that it’s easy to forget how the movie ends — with the unglamorous reality of college life revealed — when you’re blinded by the thrilling prospective experience of living in a big city. It was easy to convince myself that I wouldn’t experience the same homesickness that Lady Bird did once she finally got to New York. In reality, when I decided to follow my heart and move to Chicago for college, I found that the break from home is never completely clean. Leaving behind everything you’ve ever known is complicated, even for those who know it’s for the better.
New York University (NYU) is notorious for its motto, “The city is your campus,” meaning that the school is more of a collection of buildings throughout Manhattan, rather than a cohesive, connected and dedicated space for the school’s community to engage. This is the same concept as the college I attend in Chicago, and I find that I share the grievances with a collection NYU students in a 2018 interview.
One student discusses the sense of community on campus stating, “It’s like, you walk past someone on the street. It doesn’t matter if they go to New York, if they go here, or if they’re just a New Yorker. It’s like, nobody cares about anybody else” and “At state schools, everybody knows everybody. It’s like a whole community.”
Although you would expect a bigger city to hold more potential to meet new friends, over 50% of New Yorkers reported feeling loneliness at least some of the time according to a NYC Health survey from last year. The more people we are surrounded by, the smaller we feel. For an introvert, it can feel isolating, as being able to put yourself out there is an important quality for making friends in such a lively environment.
“I think college is supposed to be kind of a middle step in between childhood adulthood as a graduate,” Another student in the interview mentions, “and really what this does without having that campus and a coordinated kind of university atmosphere, pretty much just an adult right after freshman year, and treated like such and expected to act like such as for some people that are already occupied, including myself.”
From an outside perspective, deciding to attend an urban college in a big, metropolitan city such as New York, Chicago or Los Angeles has two major benefits. Firstly, the ample opportunities for career development ease the pressure college students may feel to prove themselves successful, either to themselves or their families. Secondly, big cities appeal to students who feel out of place in their hometown. Big cities are known for being diverse, while smaller towns may not feel as open for a young adult discovering their identity, so making the choice to move may be a no-brainer for those struggling to feel accepted.
My priorities quickly strayed from finding success and acceptance and become more about simply surviving. Recounting my experiences after my first two years of attending a college in the heart of downtown Chicago, I question my choice of moving away from my Arizona home to a life of complete uncertainty and paralyzingly cold winters. When I first moved, I found that simultaneously missing the life I left behind while trying to start a new one left me at a middle ground of loneliness and isolation. The fact that my school was located in a big city only made it harder to start this new life from the ground up, as I quickly learned what my new reality would be like.
Life in the city is expensive, and finding housing that checks all the boxes can be frustrating. While the L-train is a source of transportation, without a car, grocery shopping becomes an inevitably inconvenient, frequent trek that requires hauling everything down a busy street and up the elevator. During the winter, the journey is even more of a battle, as I have to bundle up and watch for icy patches in my path.
As for loneliness, I find myself relating to the experiences of other big city students. While I find myself surrounded by so many unique people, their abilities to so authentically be themselves is intimidating, and figuring out what type of people I want to become friends with is an overwhelming task I’ve never been faced with before. To this day, I’m still not quite sure where I belong.
Living in a big city is a challenge for anyone, so it is no surprise full-time students find it difficult to feel as fulfilled as they once hoped to be when applying to urban schools; however, these struggles come with life lessons that would be impossible to teach in a college course.
Firstly, being surrounded by so many people can become lonely for some, but there is something special about learning to trust the strangers that surround us on the subway. As I observe the lives of those different from myself, I find a unique perspective of the world through every person I see. Secondly, with the stress of surviving in the city as a broke college student, I receive firsthand experiences on how to apartment hunt in a competitive market, make money to pay bills in an expensive city and navigate the real world on my own. And finally, it is in the moments where I feel knocked down by my experiences in the city that I am reminded what brought me the most joy back home.
If you’re hoping to attend a school in a big city, you may feel like you have a life of spontaneity and adventures on your horizon, but you may be faced with quite the opposite. Though, I wouldn’t consider this a bad thing. Through my experience, I’ve seen my perspective shift from wanting to move to the city to have as much fun and become as successful as possible. Now, I understand that I don’t need all of the success and friends in the world to have the life that I want. All can hope for is to have enough to bring me joy. I’ve discovered that my desire for a comfortable life is valid, and I don’t need to strive for more.
This was the lesson at the end of of “Lady Bird” that I chose not to see until now. At the end of the film, she is shown driving through her hometown, and admiring views that she never appreciated before. Moving on to new horizons is not about forgetting where you came from, it’s about taking a step back from the experiences you already had in order to see what is truly important in your life.
