Milford Daily News
  • Ostaszewski: A year later, in college time

  • Once you have a child in college you discover something you hadn’t been aware of before, or forgot: College Time is measured differently.

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    A year in college is not even close to an Earth year. It is much, much shorter. It’s the same length of year you might expect to find on Mercury. As if they use some sort of metric year on campus. The French probably came up with it.
    The college year lasts approximately eight months. And that’s being generous. This also explains why my son Kevin is already back home, his freshman year has finished.
    It seems as if he just left for college.
    The worst part of the first year being over is that the next tuition bill is lurking just around the corner. I hate when bills lurk. If college students stayed in school until the end of June, the way elementary and high school students do, then we would not be thinking about the next tuition bill until July when – BAM – it would hit us.
    Actually, maybe that is worse. To be hit unexpectedly with the next tuition bill or to have it lurking is a toss up.
    I would feel that we got more for our money, however, if the college year lasted into June. When they come home in May, as a parent your first instinct is to ask if they were made to leave school early for some reason.
    Most parents of college students wrongly assume back in their day college semesters lasted longer. This is untrue. The difference was not in the length, but in the perception.
    As a college student, even a March 1st end date could seem like a long, drawn out semester.
    But as a parent we are not measuring time by semesters, therefore it seems to come too quickly. Most parents are happy to have their college student back home for the summer, even if summer starts mid-spring. It’s all the stuff they bring back home with them that we are less thrilled with.
    Kevin has been home a little more than a week. For the most part he has reintegrated his belongings back into our household. It’s hard to explain why this is an issue. After all, 90 percent of his stuff was here before he ever moved out. It consists mostly of clothes and personal electronics.
    Only a few items, such as his dorm bedding, were bought specifically for college. Still, it wasn’t easy finding a place to put it all.
    To explain this phenomenon, I guess it would be similar to someone my age (middle-aged) finally losing 10 pounds after years and years of trying, then one weekend gaining it all back.
    Despite being back to the same weight they were all along, it would be more discouraging now.
    Page 2 of 2 - So a college student returns home for the summer and for the parents it’s like they suddenly added unwanted pounds.
    Not that we didn’t miss Kevin while he was away. Although, technology today makes keeping in touch simple and immediate.
    I won’t bore young people with the stories of how life in college was different for us parents. I am sure they have already heard how we had to send messages home via Western Union telegrams or use the Pony Express.
    In my dorm we had a “phone booth.” This is a very tiny room with only a “pay phone” in it. A pay phone is a type of phone that works by putting coins into it, similar to a vending machine.
    Of course, being a college student, we did not put money into the phone; we called home “collect,” meaning our parents paid for the call. The downside was that unlike a brief text message today, calling home meant engaging in a full-blown conversation with your parents. The other parent would even get on the “extension,” i.e. another phone, so they could both engage in the conversation tag team style. It was exhausting.
    Eventually, we realized it was easier to wait until we got back home to talk to them. The year would be over soon enough.
    Lee lives in Medway. Email him at lee.online@verizon.net.

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