Alex
Ostrovsky
English
114B
April
29, 2012
How
Are People Shaped By Their Environment
I
have decided to write my essay about how college students can be affected by
living at the dorms versus living at home and commuting to school. I think that
this decision of living at home or dorm living has a big impact on people later
in their life. There are many reasons why people choose one option over the
other, but both can affect the students in many different ways. I personally
live in a dorm and can give first hand account as well as facts about living in
a dorm and being away from home. Many things to take into account when
comparing dorm life to living at home is how it changes you. When living at
home students tend to stay with their high school friends and maintain their
life in a normal way. To contrast this, living on campus can change students
and expose them to new things that they may never have experienced before, such
as many new found freedoms.
I
have found that many of my friends that I hung out with in high school that
didn’t go away to college seemed to all stay in touch. While many of the
friends of mine that went away to college around the country we all have lost
touch with. When living at home you feel that there is a greater need for you to
maintain the friendships with the people who stayed at home like you. When it
comes to the students who went away from home to go to school they seemed to be
more interested instead of keeping in touch with old friends they made new
ones. I find that this isn’t done simply because they were away from friends
and they felt that they needed to have people to hang out with. I think there’s
something about living away from friends that makes you just want to get new
ones.
Out
of personal experience me and my best friend since grad school managed to
somehow get a room together, this seemed like it would make college the best
times of my life but I was wrong. My best friend and I seemed to drift apart
within the first two months. Soon we weren’t even hanging out anymore and now
we don’t even talk. I think that this isn’t a bad thing at all. It’s just what
college does do people, you find new people with common interests as you and
also who have similar life goals.
People
living in the dorms and away from their parents have to learn for themselves
what is right and wrong without their parents telling them what to do. Back
when these students were public education they knew that thy had to show up to
class and do all the work or else their parents got a call from the school
telling them that their child didn’t do what they were supposed to do. When you
get away from home and there’s nobody telling you its time to go to school
there is a tendency to want to skip class or just blow off an assignment. It’s
in college that people learn what kind of person they are, will they get up and
go to class or will they blow it off for more sleep.
I
personally know that I have had battles with going to classes that I don’t
necessarily like and doing assignments that I know aren’t really that
important. I also know that I have decided to “screw it” and not go to class
just so I can sleep in, and that I also have just turned my head the other way
when it comes to doing a reading assignment for a class in order to have
another forty five minutes of TV. Its things like this that make you wonder
what does living away from home and away from your parents affect your school
work and the amount of effort you put into it. It makes you wonder if you were
in high school would your parents be getting mad at how much stuff your doing
that’s not school work.
Living
at the dorms can shape people into who they really are. It shows people how
important old friendships can be and how much they care about their education.
For me I care a great deal about my friendships and am quickly realizing that
living away from home wasn’t the best idea for me at all. It taught me that I
am not motivated enough to keep myself doing my homework and not motivated
enough to wake up for classes. Looking back after writing this I realize I just
vented and didn’t really write the paper I was supposed to write, but that’s
okay because this paper is about how my personal experience with space has
shaped me and is continuing to shape what happens to me for the rest of my life.
