The ultimate UC Davis freshmen bucket list
The end is nigh
Try every different late night option
Late night is actually the best thing ever and when you are a freshmen and have super easy access to the dc, it is super fun to take a study break at night and go eat some nice unhealthy nachos.
It would be a shame to not have experienced every late night option at least once,and in my humble opinion the highlights are breakfast bar, pasta bar, and nacho bar, so you should at least try these ones.
Spend time doing fun, cheesy roommate bonding things
I lived in a suite my freshmen year, so doing bonding things meant getting all eight of us together to go out and do something, which can be extremely difficult with everyone having busy schedules, but it was always extra fun having the entire suite hang out.
We went to dinners, comedy shows, and are even going to the farmer’s market as a suite this weekend. You only get one year to bond with your roomies, so do fun cheesy roommate things together! Have movie nights, photo shoots, get dorm drunk together. The memories you make with them will last forever and it’s always nice to get along with the people you live with.
We had a suite christmas party at the end of fall quarter!
Go to all the cheesy clichéd student housing events, like dormal!
Dormal sounds kind of cheesy and weird but go!! It is cute and fun and it’s a nice excuse to get dressed up like you’re back in high school and going out homecoming. You want to take advantage of as many different events as you can because you only get one chance to live in the dorms and be a freshman.
In my suite we sat around in the living room after dormal and ate pizza and gossiped, and it felt exactly like being back in high school and having a slumber party with your friends after prom, which is one of the best feelings ever, 10/10 totally recommend.
This was at a really fun student housing event!
Take the Yolobus to Old Sac
This sounds weird and probably horrible. Why would you want to sit on the bus for an hour? But it’s actually really fun, it feels like a field trip (in a good way) and bus rides with friends are usually really exciting.
Plus, it’s super fun to explore old sac and go to all the little shops, and it’s a good way to become familiar with the area around Davis, especially since a lot of people who come to Davis for school are not from around the Davis area.
This was inside one of the coolest shops in old sac
Pull an all nighter
Staying up all night studying and drinking red bull (or coffee, because coffee > red bull) is not healthy and is also probably not even the best way to achieve academic success, but it feels like a sort of rite of passage of the college experience, and it is somehow weirdly fun at times.
You can be like me and stay up until 6:30 am the night before your math midterm and then you will get to experience the wonderful feeling of seeing the sun come up and having the soul crushing realization that you stayed up late enough to see the sunrise and now you have to take a midterm in 2 and a half hours. Super happy fun times.
Decorate!
Be lame and make a bunch of decorations for your room and door and what not. You only get one year to decorate your dorm, so why not do it? It’s fun and it’s cute and it can make your dorm room feel more like home.
Sometimes being in a new strange place can be scary, and it is comforting to come home and be surrounded by posters and photos of friends, and if you are as cool as my suitemates are you will put christmas lights up and leave them turned on at all times because 1) screw the environment and 2) we don’t pay the electric bill yet.
I made these classy abstract snowflakes out of paper towels, they did not go over as well as I hoped, apparently they are “weird”
Have your first blackout experience
This one is kind of a joke because underage drinking is illegal and unhealthy and if you do it I will personally citizen’s arrest you. But if you are going to partake in drinking the devil’s favorite beverage, it feels socially acceptable to go a little crazy your freshman year.
You can have the excuse of “I’m just a freshmen I don’t know my limits” and that excuse is only available for a limited amount of time so why not capitalize on it?
Get really good at organizing your life
Scheduling things and planning the mundane details of life out is really difficult and you will fail at it numerous times before figuring it out, but by the end of your freshmen year you should be pro at color coding your calendar and not forgetting when your papers are due, and that is a pretty cool accomplishment.
My life has become so messy that I literally write every single thing I have to do down now
Find out some cool stuff about yourself
Freshmen year of college is an interesting time because you’re independent and free and what not, and you’re a grown up but not really a real grown up because you still live in the dorms.
This unique situation is what makes freshmen year the perfect time to begin figuring out who you are as a person, exploring your interests, and truly figuring out what you love to do, without the influences of everyone back home who has known you since you were two years old and has preconceived notions of who you are as a person.
Being young and in college is about learning more about yourself and about the world, no one has it all figured out yet, and that’s a beautiful thing, because it means you get to spend time figuring everything out for yourself.