*Note: The original version of this story stated that residents under the age of 21 were not required to obey a curfew, but it has since been edited to say over 21.

You’ve made it. You are all grown up and ready to head out on your own as an adult. Ready to start what many may call the best four years of your life. That is, unless it is your first year of college, you are under 21, unmarried, and it is a weekday.

First-year students living in dorms have a curfew requiring them to be back in their dorms at midnight, Monday through Thursday; otherwise, they must pay a fine. The exceptions to this are if you are over 21 or married. The curfew is checked by RAs who walk into each room and make sure the residents are in the dorm, said Lane Voskamp, the Wessel Hall senior resident assistant.

“There’s a tension when it comes to curfew,” said Voskamp, senior graphic design major from Aledo. “RAs are going to come into the room at night, which is just a little creepy and feels like an invasion of privacy, but I know from being an RA that’s when good conversations happen.”

Students are in charge of getting themselves to class, doing their homework, eating food, and many other important areas of their life, but are not trusted to stay up past midnight. In the long run, this may only be delaying the inevitable, Voskamp said.

“But I understand the desire to provide a safety net or caution to a freshman’s first experience here,” Voskamp said. “But also at the same time, it’s almost like we’ve done freshmen a disservice. I don’t know if you experienced this in your sophomore year, but for a lot of people, it’s like, ‘Oh, I have no boundaries. Now I’m going to do whatever I want.’ And then they crash and burn sophomore year because they didn’t learn it freshman year.”

Having to be back in her dorm at midnight last year made it harder for Tori Sarin, a now sophomore interior architecture and design major from Flower Mound. But this year she has enjoyed having the freedom to figure out her own schedule, she said.

“Most of my work is projects,” Sarin said. “I work like 20 to 30 hours on these projects, and a lot of the equipment and a lot of the stuff I use, I have to use it at the art and design building,” Sarin said. “I’m really not pushing that boundary, of staying out incredibly late, I am responsible for my time and my sleep schedule, and I know what I need, and I know I need to be back and asleep by midnight or 12:30 p.m. every night.”

For many freshmen, this is more rules than they had at home, said Hank Haentsch, freshman finance major from Fort Worth, who did not have a curfew his senior year of high school.

“I get where the school is coming from,” Haentsch said. “They want to have more structure for the incoming freshmen,” Haentsch said. “I think for most people coming into school, they already were in high school without a curfew anyway, and they learned how to manage.”

Ultimately, with her work in Residence Life, Voskamp said she felt like a curfew is more likely to hinder people from making good decisions than it is to help those who are not, and people will make mistakes, but that is not always a bad thing.

“But you learn, it’s an opportunity for people to learn,” Voskamp said. “I think there would be hard parts of that, but I think hard life lessons are a part of life, and there’s value in them.”