ARLINGTON, Va. — You’d be hard pressed to find two experiences less similar than the start of college and the start of a new job. Arriving at Northwestern meant having fun forced upon you, being heaped with praise from convocation speakers and staying up all night with freshmen you just knew were going to be your friends forever. Arriving at a new job, on the other hand, involves locating a coffee machine and wearing a tie.

So why am I enjoying my job more than I enjoyed NU?

For a long time — throughout high school, at least — college was a fantasy I spent nights obsessing over. I got heavily into the movie “Kicking and Screaming” and viewed campuses as a proving ground for goofy intellectual discussions. I was bookish, shy and unathletic. College was the place where this stuff ceased to be kryptonite and became the happy norm.

And NU didn’t prove me wrong. I found the goofy intellectual discussions. I discussed Kurosawa and played Trivial Pursuit like it mattered.

But it didn’t take long — really only a month or so — before the people I’d yearned to meet for so long began subtly dividing amongst themselves. Over a few months my fellow freshmen narrowed down their interests and their circles of friends. There were clean breaks, where people separated into cliques or found student groups that could take them out of the dorms. And there were slow, creaky breaks between people who became irritated by dashed expectations and close quarters and found refuge in gossip or cynicism.

My final three years at NU were a series of disappointments and dead-ends. Each fall I’d greet a new class, hoping that some large chunk of it would stay vibrant and avoid slipping into limiting social scenes. Most of this hope was in vain. The new classes fell into the same pettiness and slacking, subsuming the gritty intellectual side of college life and looking into cliques, booze and parties.

The problem was in the unrealized possibilities. I had bought into NU’s projected image and hoped a first-rate university could live up to my ideals. As it happened, going to college was a convoluted way of finding out I’d be disappointed by college.

But the working world isn’t haunted by any inflated expectations or high concepts. We are not promised “personal and intellectual growth in a diverse community,” and we don’t get to mix with hundreds of kids our age. We’re expected to arrive at the office on time, be the youngest people there and prove ourselves to be useful on a minutely basis.

Four or five years ago, daydreaming about college life from my parents’ house, this would have sounded like doom. But my job at USA Today steals most of the stuff I liked about NU without the disappointment and the ennui. The conversations and the intellectual wrestling exist here, and now there’s purpose to it. Now, finally, being a geek is paying some dividends.

It’d be facile to say college is worthless and the working world is perfect. But if I know NU at all, I know some of you wanted to get more out of it. Take my word for it: There’s life after NU.

And it’s better.