“Your roommate never leaves the room. . . . So much homework that you don’t know where to start. . . . The only thing lower than your GPA is your bank account balance. . . . Laptop dies [so] forced to pay attention during class. . . . Study abroad where you’re legal to drink. Come back home and you’re still not 21. . . . Professor says the test is easy. Lies.”

The many, varied, and often hilarious difficulties associated with the undergraduate experience now have an online home: College Problems. Its tagline: “Everyone’s got them. Tell me yours.”

The Tumblr site collects and projects brief user-submitted complaints and confessions about the complications of collegiate life. The entries run only a sentence or two, almost always with a set-up and a punchline and sometimes without proper capitalization and grammar.

Its founder and overseer is Madeline Huerta, a Boston University rising sophomore majoring in marine science. “I had the idea to create [College Problems] based off funny experiences that I and my friends had,” she told The Daily Free Press , BU’s student newspaper. “The first bunch I made up myself from personal experiences with me and my friends, but then I decided to let others create their own and it really took off from there.”

Since its launch in March, the site has quickly risen in popularity, becoming Tumblr’s top humor blog. According to a Free Press report last month, “Huerta now has about 55,000 followers on Tumblr with about 1,000 to 2,000 visitors to the site every day from hundreds of different universities across the country. . . . [T]he College Problems Twitter page also has about 3,000 followers with 3,000 likes on Facebook.”

Huerta believes the site’s appeal is its universality. “I think the main reason people are drawn to the site is that they can relate to almost everything I post,” she told me late last month. “Some college problems are funny things that everyone goes through, and some are more serious issues that students have to deal with. It’s a site that people visit and go, ‘Wow, I thought I was the only person with this problem.’ Students read College Problems and submissions from other students and realize they’re not alone.”

Among Huerta’s favorite submissions so far: “Get sick. No mom to take care of you. . . . Tell someone your major. They scoff. . . . You are never done with work. It literally never ends. You might think you’re done but you’re not. . . . You eventually have to graduate.”

The big question: What college problems of your own would you add to the site’s growing list?

Dan Reimold, Ph.D., is a college journalism scholar who has written and presented about the student press throughout the U.S. and in Southeast Asia. He is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Tampa, where he also advises The Minaret student newspaper. He maintains the student journalism industry blog College Media Matters.

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