IN WHICH The Girl Returns to College

If you saw my post about Buffy, you might have guessed that I have a not-so-secret obsession with teen dramas. Oddly enough, my interest does not stem from the most obvious reason: nostalgia for watching these shows as an actual teen. I only sporadically watched the popular shows of my teenage years when the WB aired them, such as Dawson’s Creek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 7^th Heaven, and Felicity. For the entirety of my teen years, I danced until nine o-clock every weeknight, right smack through prime time television. I made a couple attempts at taping shows on my VCR, but I didn't have the time, energy, or ability to tape every episode of a show. Man, do I appreciate the emergence of the DVR. However, my interest in these shows today still has its roots in nostalgia – nostalgia for the nineties, the music, the clothing, high school, and the drama of being a teen that while entertaining I only want to experience vicariously at this point in my life.

A few weeks ago I started re-watching Felicity and it tapped into a specific type of nostalgia for the college experience. The first season of Felicity really revolves around all the firsts of college, which brings back a lot of memories. Watching it, I realized that there are few shows that revolve primarily around college instead of high school. Many shows start in high school and move unsuccessfully to college. Felicity started in college so it didn't have to split up it's main cast or pretend everyone from high school ended up at exactly the same college. The show more effectively portrays the college experience than most teen shows.

In addition, most teen dramas today portray high school students as independent (few parental influences and the ability to essentially do what they want), sexually experienced, jaded towards the ways of the world, and fairly confident, at least by the time the kids graduate school. Felicity does not portray any of these things. I appreciate that here is an 18 year old girl who is totally clueless; she’s naïve, innocent, nerdy, neurotic, impulsive, and unsure of herself. It reminds me of me at that age. She exemplifies the excitement and fear of that freshman year of college perfectly.

Not only is the character of Felicity relatable (for some), the series provides many great examples of the college lifestyle. I read an article that said Felicity’s University of New York "doesn't nail exactly how college is so much as how it seems like it should feel." I agree that it includes many ridiculous elements (have you seen the size of her dorm room), but there are enough recognizable characteristics to make me squeal, “Oh my God, I remember that,” multiple times throughout the show.

Most Collegy College Moments in Felicity

1. Welcome to College

In the show, we see the college first of the firsts, meaning all those things you do the very first week of school. Felicity gets her student ID picture taken, decides what courses to take, sees her dorm room for the first time, and meets her roommate (sort of). All huge moments.

When she's getting her college ID photo, Felicity explains that she wants a good one because she'll have to live with it for the next four years. On that first day, four years of college seems like forever. You can't imagine how fast that time will go. The image catches you at the moment when everything looks bright and hopeful. Well, only for a moment in Felicity's case. While getting the picture taken, she sees the boy from her high school that she actually followed to college. Oh, did I not mention that Felicity is crazy? Her high school crush, whom she's never talked to, writes a nice letter in her yearbook and she up and changes her college plans from Stanford to New York to be near him. Granted, have you seen Scott Speedman's goofy grin? I'd probably follow him too.

Visiting your dorm room and meeting your roommate for the first time is probably the most monumental moments of arriving at college. Even if you have talked to your roommate on the phone, it's a little scary to meet this new person you will spend an entire year with for the first time. You desperately hope he or she will be your new best friend. Sometimes this works out; I luckily had a great roommate and stuck with her throughout all of college. Sometimes it doesn't. Felicity ends up with a crazyass goth chick who thinks she's a wiccan and hides a very mysterious box under her bed. However, Meghan ends up having the most interesting character development throughout the series and provides endless entertainment. She'd be terrifying at first, nonetheless.

2. Dorm Living

Felicity shows a lot of the ups and downs of living in a dorm during the first couple seasons. You really only spend a few hours in class a week; therefore, your main experiences at the beginning of college occur in the dorm. You meet your first friends there, you eat there, you sleep there, and you attempt to study there. In the show, we see lots of floor meetings, resident advisers, students attempting to do laundry and turning everything pink, dorm parties, and the cafeteria, most of which I remember well from college. I never turned anything pink though (and I'm not entirely convinced this happens in real life and not just on television). On Felicity, they even play the assassins game - you get a card with the name of another dorm member and hunt them down with a Nerf gun to obtain their card, continuing until one radiant survivor is left standing - that we definitely played my first semester at school.

The dorm item that cracks me up the most in Felicity is the mini-fridge. The mini-fridge comes up again and again during the first two years. On the show there's a lottery for mini-fridges, meaning not everyone gets one, and this causes tension and conspiracy theories among the dorm residents. I remember how exciting those little fridges were. For some reason, being able to store your own food, and not very much of it, caused all sorts of grown-up feelings. A symbol of independence! I also love Felicity's excitement at putting the first thing in her fridge: an apple. I'm fairly sure our mini-fridge in college mainly contained contraband alcohol. 

I had a very odd freshman dorm experience, living in a Radison Hotel (RadHo!) because there was an overflow of new students without enough dorm rooms. The Radison held five floors of college freshman among the regular hotel guests. God, they must have hated us. While they did move dorm beds and desks into our rooms, we still had the individual bathrooms, the televisions with cable, and maid service every once in awhile. So spoiled. After the first semester, BU moved us onto the regular campus, though we mainly ended up in upper classman housing because those rooms opened up faster due to students studying abroad and graduating early. Overall, I got very lucky in my dorm rooms.

3. It's Nice to Meet You

Now, if you go to a state school near your home, then you would have a bevy of friends from high school to start the year off with. However, Felicity went across the country to school and only knew one person there from high school - as did I. Therefore, the dorm, should you live in one, becomes the meeting ground for most of your friendships. Most of Felicity's long term friendships start that first semester in the dorm: Julie (though they technically met in class, they do live across the hall from each other as well), Elena, Noel, Meghan, and Richard (should you want to call him her friend). Proximity plays a big role in forming friendships, and these people live right next door. Plus, those first few weeks of college are slightly terrifying, so finding a few people to help you through the process is key.

For at least Felicity and me, these freshman year meetings form the core of your friendships throughout college. For me, living in the hotel really bonded our group of students because we were farther away from the main campus and not only lived together but traveled back and forth to classes and dining together. Most of my friends throughout college lived in that same dorm with me the first semester of school, and that goes for the friends I have today as well. I still see two of my college best friends regularly (I'm actually going to hang out with them this afternoon), and we're all RadHo alumni.

What about the romance? College provides an onslaught of potential mates, plus you are still dealing with all those annoying teenage hormones so every crush feels ginormous. Felicity obsesses over her Ben crush to a stalkerish degree, hopefully more than the normal girl, but it's easy to remember how big those feelings seemed. However, she also experiences all of the dating firsts with Noel, which is very entertaining to watch. The Ben vs. Noel dilemma creates much of the show's drama. For me, it really depends on which episodes I'm watching and at what point in my life. In the first season, Noel definitely wins the contest, but later he becomes annoying and clingy and Ben gains character. You can still find plenty of articles arguing for one beau over the other, so clearly the triangle gained a passionate response from the audience.

Lastly, parents can play a big role in your college experience. One of the hardest things to do when starting school is figure out how to mix your past relationships - parents, friends, significant others - with your new relationships. For Felicity, she has the hardest time doing this with her parents. They are understandably worried when she changes her college plans a couple months before school starts. However, they take this too far, trying over and over again to drag her back to California to focus on medicine instead of art (the girl is still going to a good college - chill). We quickly learn that Felicity's decision to move to New York has less to do with Ben and more to do with making a move towards independence from her parents. Breaking away from your parents and trying to determine your own identity away from past influences can be extremely difficult, but it is a necessary part of growing up.

4. Major? What Major?

Art or medicine? Psychology or English? Dance? Some people go to college knowing exactly what they want to study. Most of us don't. Felicity can't decide between pre-med, her parents choice that she also enjoys, and art, a passion she's had for a long time but hasn't seriously studied before. She's even further along than many students, who don't even have two options picked out. One of the best things about college is the array of classes available. You can take anything from The Social Life of Paper to Costumes of Czarist Russia. On the other hand, the number of options might overwhelm students and make it hard to focus. In the end, it often doesn't matter exactly what you studied, as long as you actually studied. Felicity eventually decides on art, but ends up going back to school for medicine after she graduates. I majored in psychology and then went back and got my master's in English later. Things never really go how you think they will.

Felicity does, however, show the craziness of signing up for classes, taking college level courses, and studying. As the article mentioned earlier says, this show, oddly enough, has the students going to class and studying fairly often. This is college after all, and while it does have a lot of fun elements, you still need to attend class and do your homework every once in awhile. Some of the funniest episodes take place during finals. We see Felicity and her friends camped out in the library, freaking out about topics they don't understand, and taking things like smart powder to stay awake. I certainly remember spending hours in the library during finals week and how much stuff people would bring with them. I mean some people had provisions for several days: food, pillows, alarm clocks, insanity. Dorky me today is like, oooh that looks fun.

5. A Brand New City

Lastly, Felicity portrays the shock and joy of moving to a new city at a young age. Now, this element will highly depend on where you went to school. However, even if you stayed close to home, you probably moved to a new town for school. This move involves learning how to get around and all that the new town has to offer (aka the bars). Felicity moves from Palo Alto to New York City, so she needs to readjust to the big city. We often see her out in the city as she tries to figure out the subway system, finds a neighborhood bar to attend regularly, goes on dates to fancy restaurants, and visits museums for class. She finds it overwhelming at first but adjusts quickly.

While Boston isn't nearly the size of New York, when I moved there from Kansas, it still seemed huge. BU, like Felicity's version of NYU, doesn't have a traditional campus, so the city becomes your campus in a way. BU's buildings run along a very long street by the Charles River. Due to laziness, we often took the T train from one end of campus to the other, integrating city and campus life regularly. In addition, Boston includes like 400 colleges, so you can travel from campus to campus for parties and meet college students practically anywhere in the city. It's like one gigantic college party across the city, or at least that's how it appeared at that age. Working adults probably have a different vision of the city.

People claim that the ratings dropped in the second season due to Felicity chopping off all her hair (I definitely do remember that moment from the original airing: everyone freaked out!). While probably somewhat true, the second and further seasons also involve less of Felicity stumbling through the college firsts. She inevitable becomes more comfortable with herself and her life in New York, switching the focus of the show to the relationships rather than the college experiences. I still enjoy the later seasons, but they are never quite as fun as the first season. Felicity vicariously takes me back to college from a slightly more idealized and dramatic viewpoint. Television nostalgia gets me every time.