Column: College is often glamorized in many mainstream mediums

Stop lying about college. Movies like “Neighbors,” songs like Asher Roth’s “I Love College” and TV shows like “Blue Mountain State” depict college as a perpetual party. These works don’t just fuel the unrealistic, glamorized expectations of undergraduate life; they create them.

There’s essentially a verbal template when it comes to talking about college and all of its infinite glory. It’s rare that we’re honest.

I cringe with frustration every time I eavesdrop on those discussions, the ones of convincing enthusiasm and withheld vexations.

“Nobody’s, like, ‘cool’ in college,” my 24-year-old neighbor, a college graduate and now a Subway cashier, said to high-school me, scoffing at my naivete. “It’s not like high school — there aren’t cliques.”

Now as a senior in college, I know she’s partially right — it’s not like high school. There are times when it’s worse.

There are cliques, there is exclusion and the dynamic of “coolness” is different. Many of us used to watch the cool kids in grammar school or high school from afar, resting assured that we were smarter or more ambitious — that one day we’d go places, and they wouldn’t.

Now, “one day” is here, and the cool kids aren’t the ones who skip classes and fail tests. They use big words and have bigger resumes than we do.

So many college-themed works don’t broadcast this grit of undergraduate life because it’s ugly. We never see these TV or movie characters get rejected from a party, eat lunch alone or have a panic attack.

We never see any of them lie awake at night, cripplingly homesick, wondering if tomorrow will be better.

Because it’s not pretty. But it is relatable, and it would help. It’s not fair that students compare themselves to the characters in these works that broadcast college as a utopia laden with never-ending parties, immediate lifelong friends and implied inclusivity.

Freshmen arrive with foldable hampers and the impression that everything will be OK because that’s all they’ve seen and heard.

For my first two years of college in Delaware, I illusorily painted college as amazing. Then I transferred. I wrote a book, called “The Good, The Bad, & I’m Ugly?” about the real college — the one that is great not because of its utopic setting, but because of its ability to push us.

The book isn’t pretty, but it’s funny, and it’s real.

I stopped lying, and I wish everyone else would too.