As most of you are gearing up to go back to school, I am sitting on my parents’ couch (eating cookie dough) flipping through my pictures from the past 2 glorious years. Northwestern doesn’t start until late September, so I still have a lot more time before I start my junior year.

Me, a junior! I can’t even believe it myself.

I can still vividly remember driving to my high school graduation, trying to make sure my white dress didn’t get dirty and feeling grateful that I had foregone the mascara. But those days are long gone and now, as an almost-junior, I’m already starting to think forward to my next big graduation. I’m wondering where I’ll be in life, what my plan will be, what experiences I’ll look back on fondly that haven’t happened yet. Older people always tell me, “enjoy college, best four years of my life!” Ok, yeah, thanks. That doesn’t thoroughly scare me. Does it count as nostalgia if the experience hasn’t even ended yet? Read More »

Ah, summer. The temperatures rise, the air thickens, our tans darken (unless you work in an office like me), and we go back to the old friends from home that we haven’t spent much time with in the past year. But among the mass of people you used to see all the time in high school, there are six different types of people that you will never see over your long summer vacation at home. Read More »

While every college girl shares many of the same college experiences (selling books, sexiled, one shot too many), she also carves her own path and has her own unique adventure. Have you ever wondered what it’s like for other girls? What it’s like to go to an all-girls school? To go to fashion school? To double major? To get married?! Well wonder no more. Our one-of-a-kind CollegeCandy writers (and readers!) are sharing their unique experiences and opening our eyes to different college worlds.

Are you doing something spectacular/different/interesting that you want to share? Send your ideas over and perhaps you could be telling your story right here.

I’d bet my graphing calculator that you don’t have many girlfriends that are engineers. It’s not because we’re antisocial (well, I’ll speak for myself on that one…), it’s because there aren’t many of us to begin with. Sure, it may seem like a pretty sweet deal to be one of seven girls in a class of 100, but I promise its not all it’s cracked up to be.

Let’s start with a day in the life of. Unlike most other college girls, I get taken less seriously if I dress well. Yes, wearing a cute blazer and jeans (or make-up and accessories) actually diminishes how seriously my peers and professors take me. For some reason, certain professors seem to hold it against me that I am a girl going into a seriously male dominated world. However, being taken seriously is seemingly on the bottom of my to-do list when it comes to classes.

For example, this past semester I had one assignment due per each one of my five classes per week. An average assignment is about 5 problems long, making around 25 problems due per week. Not so bad, right? That is until you take into account the level of difficulty, the amount of time spent and precision required for each section of each problem. Whether it’s the 16 points I got off an assignment once for writing Page 1 instead of Page 1/8 on each page, or the time I neglected to box my answers properly (apparently circling them wasn’t sufficient that day…), every assignment seems to bring its own headache in a unique form. Four hours, two lattes, and nearly half a pad of engineering paper later, I might have finished half of an assignment.

That is, if I had no other commitments and rarely made a mistake. Read More »

While every college girl shares many of the same college experiences (selling books, sexiled, one shot too many), she also carves her own path and has her own unique adventure. Have you ever wondered what it’s like for other girls? What it’s like to go to an all-girls school? To go to fashion school? To double major? Well wonder no more. Our one-of-a-kind CollegeCandy writers (and readers!) are sharing their unique experiences and opening our eyes to different college worlds.

Are you doing something spectacular/different/interesting that you want to share? Send your ideas over and perhaps you could be telling your story right here.

I guess I haven’t had what most people would call a normal college career.  I’ve definitely had my share of the normal college experience – dumb freshmen antics, frat parties, enough beer pong to last a lifetime, all-nighters, roommate drama, last minute papers, and really great friends – but there is one thing that makes me different.

On July 10th, 2010, a few months before my senior year, I will be a wife.

Yeah, check that. Read it over once more.  I expect more than a few WTF’s on that one.  I certainly received them when I casually went over wedding details with friends last spring in several of my classes.  For the people that know me really well, it didn’t come as much as a surprise.  I’ve had my wedding planned since I was about eight years old, wanted to be a mom when I grew up with the aspiration to pop out about twelve kids.  But after I entered college never-been-kissed and jumped into a world of man trouble that led me to some severe man-hating, I didn’t think it was going to happen.  So on New Year’s 2008, when I had firmly resolved to swear off men all together to foster greater focus and better grades, God or fate or whatever decided that it was time I meet “the one.” Read More »

Got some college questions? Unsure of a decision? Living at home for college? Just wanna chat it up with some really awesome chics? We’ve got the girls for you. Hit them up in the comments or shoot them an email with the subject “College Q&A”! They’ve got all the answers you need, no matter who you are.

Question
Last year I wasn’t really looking for a boyfriend, so I was hooking up with this REALLY hot guy, John from the Co-Ed sports team I play on. It was only ever good times for both of us, and it happened maybe four times over, like, eight months, and we never even had sex. Since then, John’s gotten a girlfriend and we’re still really good friends who communicate really well. No problems there.

The real problem? John lives in a suite with seven other guys, pretty much all of whom are equally hot. One of them, Jack, is more gorgeous than the rest, but outside of that, he’s sweet and intelligent and funny and really, really dedicated to making the world a better place, which is really important to me. He’s pretty reserved, so he only started opening up to me at the end of the semester, but now we’re really close and we talk all the time and he seeks me out at parties to spend time with me, which is huge because he’s really shy. I am unbelievably into this guy, but is it completely unethical to date a guy when you’ve already hooked up with his suitemate? Do I even have a chance, since I’m pretty sure Jack knows about it? And finally, should I try to clear the air about it with Jack? What are the rules regarding guys and suitemates? Please help! Read More »

Look back to the person you were when you walked onto campus your Freshman year. Whether that was 4 years ago, 3 years ago or just 8 months ago, you’ve come a long way, baby.

College time is like dog years; the things you accomplish/see/learn/sleep through in one year would take seven in the real world. And by the time you graduate, you’ll have a whole lot to look back on. Between your academic accomplishments, your social accomplishments and just those little things you’ve learned about life (like doing your own laundry – HUGE milestone!), there’s a lot to be proud of. I know I’ll always look back on my four and a half years (yes, getting my parents to pay for one extra semester was a HUGE accomplishment) and feel proud about that time I didn’t die when Jell-o wrestling my roommate in my backyard.

Having done so much, it’s hard to pick out our greatest college accomplishments, but this week I asked the CollegeCandy writers (and all our Twitter/Facebook friends) to come up with theirs:

Kari – Florida State: My greatest accomplishment is an even tie between raising $300 for charity playing quarters and getting invited to a party thrown by a secret society. Equally awesome.

Hannah – University of Northern Colorado, Greeley: Never sleeping through my 9 am class that I HATED even though it would have been so much easier! [Submitted by a fabulous reader via Facebook.]

Rachael – University of Miami: Managing to earn myself a position in nearly every student organization I’m involved in, as well as placing in nationals with my debate teams two years in a row, all while maintaining a good enough GPA for Deans’ List or higher four out of six semesters. Balancing all of that is definitely my biggest achievement! Read More »

Your co-workers/parents won't be nearly as impressed with this as you'd think.

Keg stands, day drinking, mardi gras beads, vegging out at home during the holidays… these are all things that happen during college. And by all accounts, they should happen, you know, before you’re catapulted into the real world where whatever you do at your local bar on a Thursday will not go over well in your cubicle on Friday.  Yeah, not only does college give you that yummy degree, it gives you the freedom to act like a college kid. It’s like your student ID is a ‘get by free’ pass, and just about anything goes.

Which is a really beautiful thing.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) for our well-being, some things belong with college and college only. Much like Vegas, what happens on campus should probably stay on campus. If you want people to continue loving you in the real world, anyway.  And with the end of college nearing for so many of us, it might be time to lay those things out. So here is a list of the 20 things that are only OK in college: Read More »

[Everyone's got a morning after story and we wanna hear yours! Send it over to us and we'll post it - anonymously, of course - right here!]

I was living at home for the summer and trying my damdest to survive. All of my friends were either still abroad or doing the internship thing in New York, so I had no one to hang out with besides my parents. And oftentimes they wouldn’t even hang out with me. So I did what any other bored 21-year-old would do – I got a boyfriend.

The kid wasn’t great, but he had some cool friends and he treated me well enough. If anything, it would be just right for 3 months and then we could go our separate ways come Fall. The only problem was, I found him horribly irritating when we were sober. He thought he was sooo funny (he wasn’t), soooo smart (maybe at Jeopardy trivia), and soooo perfect (which he could have been had he actually been funny or brilliant). That being said, most of our time together was spent at the bar. Read More »

90% of my choices in college were completely spontaneous. I never knew what I was going to say or do until 30 seconds before it happened. Some days I would go to class and some days I would spend six hours debating the underlying philosophy behind the SNICK line-up of the ’90s. Some days I would put on pants with zippers and some days I would walk to the quad wearing nothing but fake Uggs and a sweatband. The only thing that was for sure every day was that I would regret something I did the night before.

Now, almost a year out of college, I would say 99% of my day is regimented, scheduled, planned, organized, and color-coded on my Google Calendar. I know people in the army who have more flexible schedules than me (and by people in the army I’m referring to the Disney channel documentary, Cadet Kelly).

I wake up at 7:45, press snooze exactly 3 times, look at myself in the mirror and debate if I need to shower, turn on the light and realize that I without a doubt need to shower, blow-dry my hair while praying that one day it will dry stick-straight, walk to work, step in front of a bus and make a bet with myself if it will stop before hitting me, work, go home, watch reruns, eat dinner, squeeze fat rolls and blame my birth control, eat stale Valentine’s Day candy sent by my mom, try to convince my roommates to get a dog (Shar, back me up here), go to bed, have a bad dream about getting hit by a bus. Read More »

[Everyone's got a morning-after story and we wanna hear yours! Send it over to us and we'll post it - anonymously, of course - right here!]

A few months into my fall fling last year, my mom called me to tell me that my brother would be playing a lacrosse tournament on my campus and that my whole family was coming down to have lunch with me. I was excited to see everyone, but a 12pm lunch date wasn’t going to stop me from having my fun the night before. All I had to do was take a few precautions: no hickies, a cute outfit already picked out, water bottles and Advil ready, and an alarm set early enough to get my bright, happy (not hungover) self to lunch just in time to see my family.

Before heading out on Friday night, I got everything ready and set out for another typical bar night. It went like any other – lots of cocktails, lots of dancing, lots of bathroom trips – and ended with some “wannaa meet pu??” texts. My then “fling,” we’ll call David, and I decided to have a little sleepover. We stayed at his place (a good half-hour walk from my own apartment – sometimes I hate big campuses) and I ritualistically shut my phone off before we fell asleep. Read More »