My Fifth Year Of Highschool :: essays research papers

With dim lights hanging over green felt-covered tables on one side of the room and loud, blinking arcade games on the other, and music blaring from a jukebox, there was no way I was ever going to leave the university. Only a dollar twenty-five to play pool here for an hour! And when it wasn’t my turn, I could go and play pinball! Every day, hundreds of students hung around the arcade, shouting, laughing and looking to challenge someone to a game of pool or a shot at beating you on an arcade game. Yes, I came away from there many times with a bigger ego. I never left after being defeated-you just had to find someone else and beat him or her. I lost a lot of money in that gloomy basement amidst the cracking of pool balls and the beeping of video games. But I took something out of it too. In a way, all the money I lost was paying for what I know now: an arcade should not substitute for college, even if the arcade is in the basement of the student union. As a freshman at the University of Arizona, I at first found myself awed by the power of college: The flocks of people-students and professors alike-mingling on the mall, in the buildings, and in the Student Union. And in the early weeks of my first semester, I quickly found my favorite place on campus: the arcade. Billiards, table tennis, video games, and music. All the trademarks of a college student’s recreation area. It was in these first few weeks that my impression was made about the university. When friends or relatives would ask me questions such as â€Å"How’s college?† or â€Å"What’s school like?† I would tell them what I really thought. I would say, â€Å"It’s like high school, but with a lot more people, a bigger campus, and a lot of time in between your classes.† And that is the plain truth. My class work did not offer much of a challenge-it was more or less the same stuff I’d been seeing for years. The professors weren’t that big of a deal-they were much like high school teachers, but you got to call them by their first name. And the number one best thing about going to college? I didn’t always have to go! That’s right: attendance in some of my classes wasn’t even mandatory.