I am a recent college graduate, so my answer to this question is slightly different as it sums up my entire college experience instead of just the freshman year. My prevailing thought regarding the U.S. university system after leaving it for the "real" world is this: I want to go back.
I don’t belong in the working world. This is not to say that I won’t and/or don’t enjoy work. I do. I enjoy both mental and physical work. Leisure time is worthless without work to compare it to.
Like I assume many noders did, I breezed through high school with minimal effort. College was an adjustment for me. I had to learn how to study, and I had to learn how to think. It was no longer enough to remember the facts. My college professors expected original thought from me. I was unprepared for this, and my difficulty in Introductory Psychology proved it.
College is the last time our society seems to really think it’s okay to try new things. I joined the Reserve Officers Training Corp (ROTC), and I left three years later. I’m not particularly fond of the Army, but the experiences changed me. I joined the Machine Learning Reading Group. I took only one course in artificial intelligence in college, but I stayed with the group for a full year. The topics and the company were that interesting. There is no ROTC or Machine Learning Reading Group for me here. Wait, that’s not right. Those things (or things similar to them) probably do exist here. It’s the community that I miss. The immediacy and availability of interests and groups devoted to them. Anime Club, Combat Club, Machine Learning Reading Group, ROTC, Native Americans’ Association. If you’ve got an interest in it, there’s almost assuredly a group at your university that does, too.
I miss working part time and still making enough money to make ends meet on my own. Rent was low, and the apartment was crappy, but I made enough money to buy a new CD every once in a while, feed my video game addiction, pay the rent and tuition, and buy drinks with my friends. I’m not sure if I can honestly say that now that I’m in the "real" world. I make more, but I don’t have as much free time or pocket money. Higher rent and a car payment make sure of that.
But most of all, I miss studying. That’s right; I genuinely miss improving my mind. In the long run, I couldn’t care less about how much money I have in the bank. I never missed a lecture because I was finally at a place where people loved to impart knowledge on others, and by God I was going to get as much of it as I could. I got it from lectures, labs, my campus job, and life experience. I miss the academic environment so much that I enrolled in night classes at the local university extension. It’s not the same though. Most of the students are there because their boss or their boss’s boss has a box to check.
College changed me. It made me realize that when I grow up, I want to be a college student.