Sam Draxler
Great Expectations
college on tv isn't always reality
PrintBeginning college was a scary time for most of us—it was our first time away from home and in a new city. Yet we all felt like we were ready to get out of the house and away from our parents. I remember being the eager freshman, showing up early to move in and to start a new chapter in my life. After my first semester, I realized that maybe college wasn’t exactly what I expected it would be, but it was pretty close.
With the second semester of the year upon us, first-years feel like old pros. They’re ready to study up and party down, just like they’ve seen on TV in Greek, Gossip Girl, and countless other shows.
Back when the CW was just the WB, the shows we watched most were filled with characters who eventually went on to college. One Tree Hill, Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars—even Saved by the Bell—these shows’ characters progressed through high school into college. They showcased fabulous school experiences, everlasting friendships, and the quirkiest of characters. All of these universities had such similar traits that they almost convinced us that that’s the way things really are—and then I walked into a John Jay single.
When I came to college, I was determined to have an experience like Rory or Veronica—minus the mysteries, of course—but I wasn’t deluded into thinking that Columbia was the same as college on TV. I’d already gone through high school, and since television couldn’t get high school right, not much was expected for the TV-real life overlap for secondary education, either. Most of the details that writers throw into scripts are simply attempts to make college more interesting than it actually is, and aren’t there in actuality.
Writers tend to use generalities when writing about college: there’s always the jock, the slacker and the queen bee, for one. There are common settings such as dorms, fraternities, lecture halls, and cafeterias that generally don’t translate well to reality. Evan Burger, a first-year in CC, finds aspects of college life that are similar to what we see on TV. “There are rites of passage that students have to go through to join certain clubs—like fraternities or the Philolexian Society—but there is nowhere near the level of hazing that is shown on TV,” he said.
But most of the time, the little details don’t quite reflect what college life is like in the real world. Large dorms and beds are commonplace even though it is doubtful that New York University has anything as large as Vanessa’s room in Gossip Girl,and partying seems to be a non-stop staple. There are fraternities and sororities at Columbia, each with their own histories and initiation practices, but they don’t have the large mansions we see in Greek. A large part of this might simply be because Columbia is a New York City school: large dorms are out there somewhere, but here it just isn’t practical. When I came to Columbia I did not expect to end up with a large dorm—this is New York, after all—but my friends at other, more rural universities have enviably large rooms and apartments. Other friends are members of Greek societies who have the large mansions seen on television.
Nevertheless, it would be difficult to have a show capture the true essence of Columbia—how fun would it be to watch a TV show where all the kids do is study in a library hours on end? We don’t fit the Ivy League stereotype of the upper-crust college populated by men who wear sports jackets to class and play polo for fun. There are far too many hipsters on campus for us to be predominantly like Keith Powell’s Toofer on 30 Rock or Chace Crawford’s Nate Archibald in Gossip Girl. A show that truly captured our culture would most likely show the strange juxtaposition between our intense partying on the weekends and cracking down in the library after we’ve recovered from Sunday-morning hangovers, like a college version of Grey’s Anatomy.
The generalized American college experience can’t be boiled down into one or even a handful of TV shows. Our campus is not indicative of the 4,000-odd colleges and universities in America, and neither will television capture every college perfectly on the small screen. “I would never trust a TV show to teach me about life,” Roman Rodriguez, a sophomore in CC, said. “Of course, there are parts that they get right, but many more that they get wrong. There are so many different universities that television can’t show the true range of American higher education experience.” Even after our long childhood exposure to university life through TV and other media, it’s still hard to pin down exactly what should be expected from college.
Television is always a reflection of the current society—for example, many shows today include families that have financial difficulties—so there must be some truth to what we see on our small screens. What television makes clear to today’s viewer is that students have a large range of options. Shows focus on generalized parts of the American college life. Students can choose if they want to party like Greek’s Cappie or study like Gilmore Girls’ Rory.
“There is always a party going on somewhere at Columbia, whether it is school-sanctioned or not,” Maddie Scott, a freshman in BC, said. “In that way, it’s just like what we see on TV. But I don’t think beer pong is as popular as they would have us believe.”
People are drawn to television because it is fun to forget our lives for an hour or two—hence all the fictionalizing. Yet it does reflect our current society, and so we will find similarities between television and college. We remember that we can’t believe everything we see on TV, and with that, we know that we shouldn’t expect college to be like those fictional universities on the small screen.
4 February 2010
vol. 8, issue 2
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