Taking advantage of new places and new faces

At the end of high school, many students cannot wait to leave those hallways behind. Leaving high school for college often means a fresh start, a new identity. While rebuilding yourself from the ground up is always a great opportunity, your new identity should never be based on lies.

Anonymously, people can share secrets on a site and app called Whisper. Similar to Post Secret, it is a website where people from all over the world send in their secrets on a decorated background. The Huffington Post took a look at some college students and the secrets they have to share. One Whisper post in particular was revealing not only a secret, but a fake identity one student has been living with since he began college;

“I’ve been faking a British accent ever since I got to college three years ago.”

Students sometimes take this idea of a clean slate a little too far, like this example shows. Taking an essential element of who you are – where you’re from – and lying about it to everyone, yourself and closest friends included, is taking it way too far and abuses the good intention behind starting over for most students.

In college, and most other social situations, fitting in does not require lying to your peers. Lying about your identity can have serious consequences in the real world. In the business world, a stunt like this could get you fired on grounds of misrepresentation. In the medical world, you could lose your authority with patients and clientele. Taking advantage of when people don’t know who you are and lying about your identity can more often than not become a complicated and compromising situation.

Lying about things like having a foreign accent or being a particular kind of person have a limited number of benefits. It may be a great conversation starter or a particularly interesting and different trait, but it’s not going to open a lot of doors for you down the road. But when someone asks the lying individual how growing up in England was or what are the major differences in the cultures, the lie would just keep growing.

To know yourself is what a lot of teenagers struggle to do. In college, just because you don’t know anyone anymore and they can’t call you on a tall tale doesn’t mean you should dupe yourself out of figuring out who you really are or letting others see who you really are.

College life should help develop an individual for adult life. By creating a secret life and lying about your identity only inhibits the liar’s individual growth and maturity towards adulthood.

There are so many other ways that you can find your own new identity in college.

If finding out who you are requires meeting new people, then there is no better way than to do it than join a club or go to a university game. Find a club that works with one of your hobbies or pick up a new hobby. Going to a university game, or being a part of managing, leading or cheering the team is another way. As long as you are cheering for the home team, you should have a problem of fitting in.  

No reason to lie there.

As children we were taught to be honest through fairytales and our parents. As we get older, television shows like Boy Meets World or Lizzie McGuire showed us the consequences of lying with friends and romantic relationships. These lessons should not be forgotten once we become college students.

College grants people the opportunity develop new identities for themselves. While some may take this opportunity to develop false identities by lying to everyone they meet, there are some significant consequences to doing something like that. It is better to choose new friends, develop new hobbies and interests and using those to add on to your existing identity instead of creating a new you.

 

Kristen Kuron is a junior English and digital media design and can be reached at kuronk@duq.edu.