SOS

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Maybe this should be a reply to "I HATE COLLEGE," but I actually enjoy it. I like my classes. I love my friends. I go to a very good school. My only problem is living on campus. I share Agnes Scott with about eight hundred other students plus faculty and staff. Most of them are wonderful people, but the relentlessly social nature of the campus is chewing me up. Dorm life, unending smalltalk, constant noise and chatter, a crowded dining hall, shared bathrooms, and the perpetual conversation that permeates every inch of thne small campus is erroding my sanity. Ironically, its culture of friendliness, tolerance, and inclucivity is making it miserable for me to live there. I get off campus and find ways to spend time alone. I engage in physical activity. I pray. The stress is still bad enough to manifest physically. It sits in the pit of my stomach like a rock. It makes it hard to eat, sleep, and pay attention and almost impossible to enjoy anything. I am always tired. It colors my day from the time the alarm goes off at 6:45 until I fall into uneasy rest well after midnight.

Does anyone else who is in college or has been to college feel this way? What did you do? How did you make it liveable? Right now, the most workable solution seems to be not living at school and comuting from my parents' house next year. Do any of you have other ideas or strategies?

when i was in college, i had a small fan in my dorm room that i would run all day/night to block outside noise. in addition to the fan I wore earplugs. and if the noise was especially bad, I put headphones on top of the earplugs and listened to music. I found that fan+earplugs+music blocked almost all noise.
my first semester was the hardest because i had a roommate. i used to go home every other weekend and do hours and hours of homework in the peace and quiet of my parents' house. but for the remaining 7 semesters i managed to get my own room. i always chose a room in the quietest possible area of the building (as far as possible from bathrooms, stairwells, common rooms, and freshman rooms). another thing i did sometimes was wake up extremely early (5 or 6 in the morning) and do work for a couple of hours while everyone else in the building was still asleep. i always took my take-home exams in my room from 5am-8am.
try to make it so that your "down time" occurs during the busy hours on campus, so that you aren't trying to do anything important while everyone is being the noisiest. then it won't bother you as much.
does your dining hall offer take-out? for dinner each night, i used to go to the dining hall, get a take-out container and eat in my room, watching tv shows on my computer.
exercise was also a great way for me to release built-up stress. during my sophomore and junior years, i exercised for 1-2 hours a day. if people at the gym were loud, i just turned up my music and drowned it out.
i hope some of my suggestions are helpful to you.
good luck!

I managed never to have to do the dorm thing - but living at home is not woithout stress. I maximized time in the library, in an unused classroom, at the union, in the woods.

I'm currently attending a community college while staying at home. I would, however, like to get a dorm once I transfer to a university. Dorm life has always sounded fun to me, and it would be a good way for me to make more good friends.

Arminius, it sounds like you're doing basically the right things by getting away, exercising, etc. I also had a very hard time in college with the dorm, dining hall, library, and chapel services. Everywhere I went on campus, there were just too many people!

The thing that helped absolutely the most was having keys to dark, quiet campus buildings. My on-campus job was running sound systems for various events, and because of this I had keys to buildings and control rooms. Often, especially when things were especially crazy in the dorm or the library, I'd gather my books and go hole up in an empty control room in an otherwise empty building. This was GREAT, and saved my sanity on a regular basis.

In addition, I did make a friend of a professor, and he allowed me to come over on some weekend afternoons. It was good to be in a house with sane people who didn't bug me all the time.

Also, I built my closet in my dorm room into a "quiet zone." It was a huge closet in a tiny room, and I didn't have very many clothes. I set up a chair clear in the back, with a reading light. My clothes hanging provided good sound insulation and I couldn't hear anyone at the door, so I was able to concentrate or just chill.

I note the tuba in your avatar. I played the tuba in college so this piqued my interest. If you are a musician, sometimes claiming a practice room as "yours" and hanging out in it even when you aren't practicing could be a good thing.

Good luck. PM me if you want.