A Different Type of College Story,

From a College Student

“Arthur, a junior disillusioned with his college experience, joins a secret society, Amethyst, of similarly frustrated undergrads determined to bring about a revolution to their broken campus culture. Within this group of wronged misfits, Arthur finds a community, and through their mission, he finds a greater purpose. At the same time, however, he’s pulled in the opposite direction by his new friend, Mia, a coworker at the school newspaper, who believes there’s other, more productive, ways to create change. As the secret society’s methods of revolution escalate, Arthur contemplates what he really wants to accomplish, and who that makes him as a person.”

 

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The paragraph above is the synopsis for a limited television series, Caught in College, the manifestation of my Capstone project this semester. This project originated from wanting to tell a story about the challenges young people face when coming of age in the sometimes toxic college environment.

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It’s unexplored territory for the most part. The current landscape of film and television is mainly void of accurate depictions of the complete college experience. The content that does depict college seems to glorify a certain lifestyle, presenting young people solely in artificially positive moments, like immersed in a party or enjoying a drug. Rarely do we get to dig beyond the surface into the complicated reality of what coming of age feels like today. Exposing these complications, and how the college experience contributes to them, became the goal of this story.

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One such complication for young people is identifying their purpose. So many kids enter college believing that they are going to find their purpose at some point in the next four years. They naively believe answers to all their questions are on the horizon. Instead, college often complicates that search, as we begin to question who we are, are values, and what we actually want from life. My story engages with this reality, and questions how the modern college environment, a scene offering young people complete freedom, and access to just about anything, impacts and deters that search for meaning and purpose. We are introduced to Arthur at a time when he is incredibly frustrated with the lack of meaning he feels in his life. The story then becomes about how different people deal with not having a purpose and, oftentimes, try to create their own.  

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Another complication young people face as they come of age is the search for a community to be a part of. Young people desperately want to be a part of something bigger than themselves because such affiliations can act as proxies for purpose. In other words, we define ourselves and our goals through the groups we associate with. There may be no place where this tendency manifests as explicitly as on a college campus. You are the major you study and you’re like the other students in your major. You are the fraternity or sorority you joined and you’re like your brothers or sisters. Whether you join an a cappella group or the club field hockey team, you become that thing. Prefer one bar over another? Your preference says something about your personality and who you hang out with. These labels and groups define how others see us, and in turn, we usually begin to embrace them as who we are because they are convenient and safe. At the beginning of the story, Arthur is frustrated with the communities he identifies through—his fraternity experience is shallow and repetitive; his work for the school newspaper is empty and superficial—and through this frustration he attempts to redefine himself within a new community. His search for a new home is fulfilled by a secret society. Through this journey, the story comments on how young people often make poor decisions in their attempt to fit in, and how easily we buy into the beliefs of those around us.  

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A final complication of coming of age the story tries to expose is the different ways people react to obstacles and trauma. Over the past four years, something that has become apparent to me has been just how widespread mental health struggles are across college populations. In the opening scene of the show, when describing the college environment, Arthur notes, “Each night of the week was someone else’s turn to have a panic attack.” While definitely dramatic, that statement is a true description of the modern college experience, as I’ve watched it unfold, myself, too many times. The story showcases how the environment students live, work, and play in, can exacerbate their mental health struggles. The overwhelming majority of the characters presented in Caught in College are dealing with something in their past which has negatively shaped their worldview. Including those negative elements wasn’t something I had to think too hard about, instead it accompanied the natural process of creating realistic college characters. 

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In the end, exploring these themes in my Capstone project manifested in writing the first two episodes of a limited television series. While clearly fictional, as you read these scripts I hope you are placed in a very realistic Ann Arbor, populated with authentic characters. I hope you are educated on how college kids spend their time and I hope you feel the emptiness brewing amongst them. I also hope you see their brilliance, their hypocrisy, their stupidity, and their mistakes. Most of all, though, I hope you realize that secret societies, like Amethyst, filled with a bunch of depressed and disillusioned undergrads, may already be amongst us, readying their cultural college revolutions.