“Beep… beep… beep…”

The alarm clock goes off, and you hit the snooze but­ton. You expect to have your mother’s kisses, or your father’s tick­les, to wake you up. When you real­ize they're not there, you jerk your­self out of your slum­ber. This isn't high school. You remem­ber… you're now in the real world.

You're now at college.

As you turn to look at the clock, you see you're late for Euro­pean His­tory, hav­ing spent all night attempt­ing to fin­ish that psy­chol­ogy assign­ment. It's now a quar­ter to eight, and you have to be across the cam­pus in 15 min­utes. Hur­riedly, you throw on a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, and sneak­ers, and you're out the door!

When you stum­ble through the class­room door, the pro­fes­sor sud­denly announces that you have a pop quiz on the read­ing that was sub­mit­ted online. Fear hits you like a wave as you awk­wardly make your way to the back of the class. When you slowly real­ize that you didn’t check online for the reading—even though the pro­fes­sor told the class to check online for home­work assignments—you panic. Sud­denly, you find your­self long­ing for the days at high school, when your teacher reminded you every day to check online for the home­work assign­ments. How­ever, this class is once per week, unlike in high school, where you had classes every day.

You decide to just take the exam and explain to the pro­fes­sor what hap­pened. After class ends, you try to speak to your teacher about the exam, but you are inter­rupted, while he shrugs and says, “You're in col­lege now. You have to make sure to check the home­work assign­ment. You're an adult now.” But you'd much rather be a kid, when you could take a retest.

Hun­gry, you decide that since you have two hours before your next class, you can eat lunch. When you go to the din­ing hall, you can’t resist the strong urge for the cheesy pizza, the fried bur­rito, or the sweet, sweet ice-cream. Not able to resist the temp­ta­tion, you get in line for the pizza and a Pepsi. You know that you shouldn’t have it, but you can’t help it. How­ever, you flash back to when you were younger and your par­ents were telling you to eat healthy. Sud­denly, the smell of cheese makes you sick.

As you enter the psy­chol­ogy lec­ture hall and head to your desk, you feel like something’s miss­ing. You acci­den­tally left the five-page paper back in the dorm! You start to dial mom’s cell num­ber, but you soon real­ize that she can’t help you. As your mother answers the phone, you hang up. You now under­stand that you're on your own. No par­ents, no do-overs, and most impor­tantly, no nutri­tious food.

With free­dom from your fam­ily comes responsibility.

No par­ents to clean up after you, no fresh laun­dry, and no more of mom’s cook­ing. You're now respon­si­ble for tak­ing care of your­self and your items. You have to sched­ule some time on the week­end to clean your dorm room, do your laun­dry, and for many who don't like the food in the din­ing hall, go gro­cery shopping.

How­ever, you are—and always were—responsible for main­tain­ing your grades. You, and you alone, are now respon­si­ble for your belong­ings, your edu­ca­tion, and your health.

Michael Rop­polo
Rochester, New York
The author is a fresh­man jour­nal­ism major and his­tory enthu­si­ast at Rochester Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy. Cur­rently, he writes for Rochester's weekly mag­a­zine, Reporter Online. He hopes to one day work for a mag­a­zine that com­bines his love of his­tory with his love of writing.