The Good, The Bad, & I'm Ugly?: My Stories As An Uncool Undergrad

Ryan Schocket is annoyed. His undergraduate experience was nothing like what he had seen in every college-themed TV show or movie.

“College left me derailed and delirious, with a minimized self-esteem and a maximally dense body.”

As a freshman, he arrived to school knee-deep in optimism—and debt—and was met with the harsh truth that college isn’t the dreamland that it’s so exhaustingly painted as. He faced unrelenting humiliation and rejection, buffered by drunken nights and new freedoms.

The Good, The Bad, & I’m Ugly? is his collection of awkward encounters and embarrassing stories that cover facets of undergraduate life that students won’t read about on their schools’ websites.

Each story touches on these unspoken, fundamental aspects of college—like grinding at a party, going home with someone, conquering class icebreakers, overcoming inconvenient diarrhea, sharing a room, drinking, making friends, surviving stalkers, dealing with DWGs (Drunken White Girls), and more.

Embedded in this retrospective collection of humorous stories are concepts that every teen and twentysomething face: freedom, loneliness, rejection, and change.

His counsel ranges from sentimental (“The nostalgia ten years from now will transfix us, as we wonder just how we felt in that very moment of crisis or elation.”) to irreverent. (“If you can’t get into a party, say that you dropped your diabetes EpiPen when you were admitted inside earlier in the night.”)

Ripe with self-deprecation, unfiltered opinion, and hilarious commentary, The Good, The Bad, & I’m Ugly prepares and comforts both prospective and current college students. In each chapter, readers will put on the shoes of an un-famous, socially awkward victim of the freshman fifteen.

At twenty, Schocket is sure about one thing: college is not a utopia. And through his stories and advice, he hopes to guide readers before they abruptly awakened to that reality.