Influence on college students

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Influence on college students
Average college going students are in their late teens and better part of their 20s for those
who further to postgraduate levels. At their age in life, they are the most active lot of the adult
population. Because of this activity, many things are going on in their lives at the same time
coupled with the quest to experience new things in life. A college student is willing to risk and
experience, they can become careless even on matters of great importance. Many of them go to
college because of the need to pursue a certain course of their liking , which could have been
thoroughly thought out but for some, going to college can be because of a mere formality and
pressure from guardians to pursue a course. A number of factors that determine a college
student’s behavior include personal and impersonal ones.
Further, personal factors that determine student’s behavior largely have something to do
with student’s character and impersonal factors can be many ranging from peer influence to the
previous experiences by the student. Existing student’s cultures in colleges they enroll and peer
influence have great impact on these students and even the strongest in character can be swayed
to do different things they would not have otherwise done with the absence of these influencers.
Four years is an average time, which a student stays in college as per the designed programs and
curriculums. Freshmen and sophomores are the vulnerable lot and an association to a particular 
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norm can make or break a student’s life even after college. This is so because once they become
attached to some of this groupings and behavior; it is hard for one to dissociate. Fraternity and
sorority membership have proved to be the great influence to students to a particular behavior.
Alcohol consumption and sex among students have been linked to the fraternity and sorority
membership. Subsequent socializations in such groupings shape a student’s behavior further and
finer, as highlighted in Hooking Up, when Bogle mentions, “Importantly, Marie, Jen, and Violet
were juniors or seniors at the time of their interviews. Thus, they had had many opportunities to
learn how the hookup script works in college. It seems likely; as Violet suggests that many
young women are less aware of these norms, particularly during freshman year. Thus, less
experienced college women may be sexual with someone with the hope that such behavior will
lead to a relationship; they may not suspect that their sexual availability decreases their chances
of having the man pursue a relationship. One quantitative study confirmed what the upper-class
women I spoke with believed; that is, 49 percent of college students who engaged in sexual
intercourse during a hookup encounter said they never saw the person again. Indeed, members of
the campus culture had to learn over time the rules of the hookup script.” (Bogle39)
Moreover, college women believe that having sex during the initial hookup reduce their
chances of getting that person to like them back. If a college woman likes the person they are
hooking up with, they will be forced to conceal their sexual behaviors to make them look less
sexual and by so doing, they win the respect and eventual liking and love from their potential
companions. Most college women who become too sexual during the first hook up do not get to
meet those persons again because they are taken as just casual encounters and never taken
seriously. They are just used as sexual tools and if a man likes their sex performance, a woman 
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might get more than once treatment but usually they do not last any longer. If situations allow
and if a mutual feeling is shared, hooking up advance to a better stage and exclusive boy girl
relationship ensues. College girls confide that it is the man’s sole privilege to decide if the
relationship will go on or not. Women who are seen to be the ones pulling the strings are taken to
be domineering and viewed as possessing unwomanly behavior which might hurt their chances
of being in that relationship. Competition is a very common thing; and players do all within their
means to outsmart one another. It should be noted that most college man to woman relationship
do not last for long and even if they survive, they normally live beyond the graduation time. This
culture has greatly influenced how the students will behave in college and Lang has written
about this in Cheating Lessons. To quote him, he writes, “Many of the college women indicated
that it is men who decide whether to continue seeing each other or whether a relationship will
evolve. Furthermore, college women often seemed at a loss to explain why the man they were
"seeing" decided to end things, as did Jen; a junior at State University. (Bogle 41) Trying to fit
into the confines of generally accepted behavior make, the