KATHLEEN BERRY | OPINION COLUMNIST | keberry@butler.edu

Sitting cafeteria-style during meals, eating ice cream on the daily, sleeping in bunk beds, stopping to pet every dog you see and using a bike as your primary mode of transportation may all seem like activities lost to the same years spent on a set of monkey bars.

If that is more than a little disappointing, allow me to reassure you: being a college kid is like being a little kid again, plain and simple. They say history is forever doomed to repeat itself, but you never thought they meant it like this.

For a number of frustrated teenagers across the country, leaving home to go off to college is the light at the end of a long tunnel consisting of four years of high school in which no one can seem to decide whether to treat them as an adult or a child.

What everyone fails to mention when talking about the mysterious four-plus years that come afterward is they will return you to your glory days.

Remember when pancakes for breakfast was a regular occurrence, sometime back before you started reaching for the Pop-Tarts as you ran out the door? Welcome back to a full hot breakfast, my friend.

From grilled cheeses to an all-you-care-to-swirl ice cream machine, eating on a college meal plan will throw it back to the diet of elementary-school-you in two seconds flat.

I, for one, am 100 percent OK with it.

If dinner fails to pack enough nostalgia into you for one day, take a moment to check out your dorm room—I am looking at you, first-years.

Twin beds, often bunked and manipulated to allow for the accommodations of two or three more just like it fill the rooms of Ross and Residential College. Summer camp? Sharing a room with mildly annoying siblings? No; but college almost had you fooled there for a minute.

As a campus full of Butler Bulldogs—not to mention having the coolest mascot around—the students’ love affair with canines is extremely understandable. It is perfectly acceptable to ask the stranger walking their four-legged friend if you can pet their dog; you will only be the 50th college kid to ask them that day.

Small children and the world’s future leaders alike, everybody loves puppies.

Perhaps with the exception of those of you who traveled to Butler from a large city, a college campus is about the only place that you will see so many people on bicycles and skateboards outside the local playground.

Learning to ride a bike is an element of childhood. Skating down to the neighbor’s house to play is an activity of youthful summer afternoons.

Who knew these skills would come back to prove useful—or to haunt you—when one of your classes sends you down to the Jordan College Annex?

All in all, this is good news. So many twenty-somethings spend time on social media wishing that they could be little kids again.

As a college student living on campus, you are already there; take advantage of the opportunity. Put toppings on your second cup of ice cream. Go to a Student Government Association movie night in your pajamas. And try not to forget to call your parents every once in awhile. They miss the days when you were little, too.