By Daniel Wood
While most students struggle to cope with a constant stream of essays, exams and lab reports during their first year at a university, David Rattiner spent his freshman year writing a book.
Rattiner, now a junior finance major, gave some words of encouragement to next year’s incoming freshmen students on Saturday morning before he officially launched “Away at School: Snapshots of a College Freshman,” a collection of short stories and essays detailing his turbulent first year at Northeastern University.
The book takes a bitterly humorous, but realistic look at Rattiner’s life as a Long Island native who experienced the ups-and-downs of friendship, romance, partying, studying and the search for a place to “fit in” in an unfamiliar city.
“Freshman year is a terrifying year. Nobody knows who you are, and you really have to find yourself,” Rattiner said. On one hand you have the responsibility of being a little more grown-up, a little more mature, now that you’re out of high school. While on the other hand, you only have five more years before you’re out in the real world, where you’re not able to act like a kid anymore at all.”
He said maintaining a sense of humor is an important aspect of college life that doesn’t stop when freshman year is over.
“The best thing you can do is look at the world in a funny way,” he said. “I think the best human emotion God ever invented is by far the ability to laugh. And that’s where the book came from. Something funny would happen and I’d go home and write about it, that’s what it is.”
Although humor is a large part of the appeal of “Away at School,” a number of stories in the book aim to be more than just amusing; they are insightful, sometimes touching, occasionally disturbing and even the most off-beat stories depict situations familiar not only to freshmen, but to all students.
In a number of anecdotes, Rattiner writes of the painfully drawn-out decay of the long-distance relationship he and his high school girlfriend tried to preserve. In others, he writes of the eccentricities of friends and roommates, sleepwalking and excessive overeating among them.
In the most alarming story, Rattiner and his friends use fake IDs to buy alcohol, but one member of the group drinks until he reacts to alcohol poisoning and loses consciousness. The group is faced with the dilemma of whether to take him to a hospital and admit to under-age drinking, or to risk even worse consequences by helping him on their own.
With these experiences now in print in his self-published book and online in a weekly column at www.danspapers.com, Rattiner joined five other NU students to attend a panel discussion held as part of Saturday’s events which welcomed accepted incoming students to the campus.
The answers he gave to questions posed by the incoming freshmen and their parents provided a student’s perspective on life at Northeastern.
“Students enjoy the book but parents and even grandparents also really enjoy reading it,” Rattiner said. “It lets them know what the college experience is all about and what they’re getting their kid into. And it’s helpful for students because it lets them know what they’re in for.”
His advice reassured those who attended the discussion, some of whom raised concerns about the unfamiliarity of the co-op program and the safety of nightlife around Northeastern, recently covered in the media.
“There are a lot of illusions out there for people who’ve never been to college, students who plan on attending and parents who never did,” said Liam Rickard, an incoming English major. “There’s this idea that college will either be an amazing educational experience to teach you everything you need to know about the world, or it’ll be drinking and partying and sororities and fraternities every day of the week.”
Jennifer O’Leary, an incoming criminal justice major, agreed.
“It’s refreshing to hear from someone who’s just telling it like it is,” she said. “It’s something I think we all need to be told when we’re heading into a place where we don’t know what to expect; neither the educational side or the social side will be out there in excess, and that there’s a balance between the two.”
Striking such a balance was one of Rattiner’s intentions in writing his book.
“I hope it helps people relax about life and I hope it helps them enjoy more of what’s going on right now, at this moment,” he said. “Nothing is going to be completely perfect, and nothing is going to be absolutely terrible. The advice I give freshmen is the advice I’d give anybody: there are things you can do to make your time here fun, and there are things you can do that will make it not fun. It’s all about what you choose to do.”
“Away at School” currently sells for $10 in the NU Campus Bookstore and in the online store at www.danspapers.com.
