By Joshua Parrott, Staff Writer
You know them: The people who cannot believe ACU administrators would ever make them go to Chapel EVERYDAY. You have class with them: They believe required Bible classes push the ACU agenda too far. You see them: They scurry to their dormitory rooms every night because of a mandatory daily curfew.
You pray and play with them: The first few weeks after Welcome Week showed them college involves more than devotionals and intramural flag football tournaments. You hear them complain: Class, homework and responsibility add up faster than Anna Nicole Smith’s tab at the local IHOP.
Who are these people? Simple: college freshmen.
As a new semester begins, I’m sure first-year college students wonder why school lacks the 100 percent fun and excitement they hoped for, but assimilating to college life at ACU requires more than the typical adjustment skills.
Libby Watts, a transfer from Collin County Community College, agrees.
“This school definitely attracts a certain kind of person,” said Watts, sophomore English major from Plano. “I guess I shouldn’t have come here if I didn’t want to go to Chapel.”
A note to all complaining freshmen: You now know what you’ve gotten yourself into. You have a few choices: (a) stay at ACU, and be quiet; (b) stay at ACU, and keep complaining; (c) leave ACU, and be bitter; or (d) leave ACU, and realize how silly you were at 18 years old.
Did I agree with all of the ACU rules and traditions when I entered my freshman year? No, and guess what? I still don’t, but I’m glad I didn’t follow my initial decision to leave ACU after my freshman year to go to Texas A&M or Baylor. This college offers us something no other school does, and I cannot specify exactly what that is because for each of us it is different.
Regardless, I don’t make the rules at this school, and neither do you. I’m a student learning whatever I can so when I leave college in seven months, I’ll know I’ve learned something from my $20,000-a-year education. If you’re not careful, the same will happen to you.
And while some students paint ACU as a school with crazy or even strange rules, understand this: You knew that when you enrolled here.
