Oh, To Be Young And Disease-Free: 2011 Edition

I'm a little late on this but...Syracuse University Freshmen...WELCOME!

Like Indiana Jones you entered the cave full of false grails and, unlike those who chose Georgetown, Penn State and Rutgers, you chose wisely. Monday you sat down in your first college class and wondered just how the hell you ever got here.

You spent the majority of your life so far seeing college as this far-off destination that doesn't seem to ever be within the realm of possibility. One day soon...sooner than you think...college will be a far-off destination that forever moves away from you, never to return.

Morbid? Absolutely. So if you take any piece of advice, take this one...Enjoy the sh** out of it.

One day soon you'll be sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a cramped cubicle cubicle in a suburban office complex off a highway, working for a company whose name is so generic it has no meaning and whose purpose or product you can't easily quantify, working for a boss who calls you "Skippy" or "Smithy" or "Hoss" and doesn't actually know your real name while writing reports and filing documents that will never be of any value to anyone, spending the bulk of your day playing Flash games, tweeting and chatting with friends in similar "coordinator" jobs, praying for lunchtime and hoping you have enough time to drive your 1999 Chevy Geo down the road to the Wendy's drive-thru where you'll order the same value meal you order every day, scarf it down, drive back to the nondescript parking garage, drive to the bottom level where it's really dark, pop the seat down and take a 40-minute nap before returning to take in one of the day's six meetings that you never speak in and never seem to accomplish anything while watching someone else take meaningless notes for this meaningless meeting while people in suits say meaningless things about meaningless campaigns for meaningless products while meaningless VPs call-in to add meaningless buzzwords and ask meaningless questions and the entire time you will wonder how you got here and why you didn't say "YES" to every awesome possibility that presented itself to you in college.

Enjoy the sh** out of it. And if you need some specifics, check out this previous freshman orientation posts. Some of the stuff might be outdated but most of it is eternal.

Oh, To Be Young & Disease Free 2007

Oh, To Be Young & Disease Free 2009

Oh, The Slices You'll Eat...

And if nothing else, remember this...no Scarface posters and no Sistine Chapel cherubs posters. You're better than that.