College Experience: Good, Bad or Ugly?

It's that time of the year again when "freshmen" are resuming at their various colleges/institutions of learning across the world. And, as a parent, I can only wish them success in all of their academic endeavors. I also wish to share with them the following admonitions: 

In my life so far, I have come across certain individuals, and especially young women who made some dumb choices while in college. And the consequences were as varied as they were many. Some of those women voluntarily though ignorantly allowed themselves to be used like some science laboratory specimens or “guinea pigs” by some young men in need of sexual experimentation. Sadly, the eventual experience gained by the men went on to benefit some other women to whom they eventually married. 

And there were women who graduated from college with more than diplomas or degrees. They also came out with very low self-esteem, sense of disillusionment, infertility, herpes, oral gonorrhea or (and) HIV. I have also seen some women who, at the verge of getting married, were suddenly ditched because their prospective grooms discovered that the future brides were once the “bed mates” of some guys who had since become the grooms’ buddies or colleagues (men do "kiss and tell"). The worst scenarios involved women who, while in college, used to be “call girls” that serviced some rich, old men for cash or adventures. 

In later years, many of these women usually wound up as “born-again” Christians. And this is quite noteworthy except that the new faith rarely erases the physical and emotional scars the affected women sustain from their self-inflicted injuries. It’s a very sad irony that a period meant for the acquisition of knowledge can sometimes be unwittingly turned into an era of imbibed stupidity.