Growing up you hear about how difficult college is, how stressful it is and that if you’re not ready for it; you’re going to have a rough time. I heard this while going through high school and thought it was just one of those adages you hear about. How every action and grade in elementary goes on a permanent record, how middle and high school are so difficult and I thought college would be the same way. I expected to breeze through my freshman year and be golden. Boy was I wrong.
This is something I am certainly not proud of and is something that I don’t tell many people, as it is quite literally the lowest point of my academic career. During my freshman year, I let my grades slip and I failed a class and managed to almost fail out of college in the first semester. My GPA dropped below the threshold to maintain my scholarship and I received the biggest scare of my academic life, something I wouldn’t think would happen. This is when I realized that the lines about college being difficult aren’t just lines off a script. They aren’t your first grade teacher warning you about some imaginary permanent record. Those lines were true. Especially the part about college being stressful.
Now how does that introduction correlate to hobbies? Stress. The ultimate college buzzword, the one that every student has at one point ranted about to someone close with them. We’ve all faced incredulous levels of it at some point, even if we don’t want to admit it.
Finding a way to not get washed up in the sea of stress that we are practically surrounded by at all times is one of the most important ways to survive college. There are several ways to do this, several ways to build your raft, if we’re keeping with this whole ocean/sea thing, and among those ways include sports, friends and hobbies.
During my second semester freshman year as a way to deal with the enormous amount of stress that had been built up over the last several months, I took up a hobby. My friend Tyler re-introduced me to ‘competitive card games’ or CCGs, which are along the lines of “Yu-Gi-Oh” and “Magic: The Gathering,” where people take piles of cardboard and make constructed decks out of them and play each other.
I gave it a shot and picked up some cards and would casually play with Tyler whenever he and another friend would come visit me at school, at first I just thought it was a fun stupid thing we did. This was before I knew how surprisingly large the card game ‘scene’ is.
I would eventually start diving deeper into whole playing card games ‘thing’ and playing on a more competitive level, all the while utilizing this hobby to balance out school stress. My first big competitive moment was at the local card game shop, Alternate Universes, where I played in a tournament and got first place, winning a Nintendo Switch.
After that I would move onto a different card game where I would start to travel outside of the state to go play with the friends I’ve made at Alternate Universes, and other locations, my group of friends and I would band together and become a competitive team. We’ve traveled to Connecticut, Virginia, Atlantic City and other such places to play in events together in the attempt to win and get an invite to the national tournament, where there’s upwards to $20,000 in prizing.
Over the last two years I’ve made some of the closest friends I could ever imagine, people that I talk to daily almost no matter what and it’s all thanks to this hobby. It’s crazy to think about how my life would be different without this hobby, I wouldn’t have the people who’ve crept their way into becoming my best friends and I would very likely be drowning in stress at this point.
There are a lot of benefits that come with having a hobby such as how they allow you to take a break from the stress of college life, they provide you a social outlet, introduce gratification when one performs well in their hobby and can stave off a burnout. The last one might be the most important, becoming burnt out in college doesn’t bode well for a student personally and academically.
I highly recommend to anyone who doesn’t actively partake in a hobby or sport, who’s feeling incredibly stressed, to go and try out a hobby. There’s so many out there that you probably wouldn’t even think of. From card games to cooking to painting there’s a vast variety of options and communities for you to explore. It might just help you survive college.
