Editor’s Note: All opinion section content reflects the views of the individual author only and does not represent a stance taken by The Collegian or its editorial board.

You’re in the chair, cape snapped around your neck, and you’ve just told the stylist to cut it all off. Not a trim. Not just an inch. The bob. 

The scissors go in. There is, notably, no undo button.

That’s the moment I want you to remember. Maybe you’re moving into your dorm right now, bins everywhere, next to a roommate you met four hours ago. Or maybe you’re a third-year who knows exactly how many feet from Eddy Hall you can go while still successfully using iClicker. It doesn’t matter. The chair keeps showing up all four years, and someone keeps handing you the scissors and asking you if you’re sure; the only thing that matters in those moments is whether or not you say yes. 

I’m obviously not actually talking about hair. Well, I am a little; you should get the haircut. But here, the bob is a shorthand for every decision in college that feels irreversible and isn’t: raising your hand for improv when you’ve never done a scene in your life, wandering into the club whose flyer you can’t stop thinking about or switching your major at 20 because the one you picked at 17 was, in retrospect, a stranger’s decision. 

The only people who talk shit about the college bob are the ones who never got in the salon chair themselves — the ones who are currently sitting on their own in their dorm room, doomscrolling on Instagram to feel connected. Nearly two-thirds of college students report feeling lonely. Not a fringe experience but a majority one. Meanwhile, more than a third of students go entire terms without setting foot in a single club, team or campus organization. The people who sit out the haircut and those logging the loneliness, statistically, have great room for overlap.

None of that hesitation is a personal failing, for the record. It’s architecture. You go from move-in, to orientation, your dorm room and your 300-person lecture hall — the whole apparatus is built for proximity, not connection. You are put you within 12 feet of hundreds of people and expected to call that community. This is not community, it’s logistics. How to turn that 12 feet into an actual relationship is the one line item the university does not supply. You are unglamorously on your own for that part.

All of it is the bob. All of it is some version of “cut it and deal with what grows out.”

It’s supposed to be a little terrifying. If putting yourself out there was easy, there wouldn’t be a lecture hall of 18-year-olds white-knuckling their armrests every single September. That fear is the toll for your new self. Pay it anyway.

Some of these bobs are going to look genuinely bad. You’ll join a club that turns out to be nothing like the flyer promised, and you’ll stop showing up by the second week. You’ll audition for something you have no business being cast in. You’ll have a coffee “date” that you want to become something but just won’t. You’ll walk out of rooms feeling more awkward than you walked in. You might even pick the wrong major and have to start over, but you are not alone in this. About 85% of college students change their major at least once.

A bad haircut grows out in six weeks. A club that wasn’t for you reveals what actually is. A bad coffee date teaches you what you do want. The only version of the chair that fails you is the one you never sit on. 

Because here’s the thing: Nobody can get the bob for you — not your roommate and not your RA. The system will keep handing you proximity indefinitely and call it a day. College isn’t high school, where the hallway more or less provides you a social life. Here, it’s opt-in every single time, with no exceptions and no autopilot. The students who leave college changed aren’t the lucky ones; they’re the ones who kept saying yes.

So say yes. Say yes to the thing you’re bad at. Say yes to the club that sounds ridiculous. Say yes to eating lunch with people you’ve just met, to the email that feels too bold to send and to auditioning even though you’ll probably be cut. Say yes on a random Tuesday for no reason other than you were asked, and though you were scared, you did it anyway.

You’re going to collect some bad bobs before this is over. Get them. I hope you switch your major. I hope you join the wrong club first. I hope you change your hair because if it looks exactly the same on graduation as it did on move-in day, you didn’t do things wrong, exactly, but you didn’t do much of anything.

Go sit in the chair.