The transition between high school and university.

I happened to be skimming through an architectural theory book, and I was reminded why most people find the transition between high school and university difficult: The language is different, and most textbooks or articles copied and compiled into a reader, do not take time to explain the new grammar; even when they do, it is done so within this foreign grammar.  This is particularly acute when quotes are included from those completely engulfed in this foreign grammar -- think Jacques Derrida, and allow me to be ironic about Derrida:

"Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called “normal” functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way?"

It's not terribly important to understand what Derrida was saying -- but if you did, you're probably laughing at why I requested license for irony -- except to understand that in high school, you are not likely to be exposed to this type of grammar.

Specialized majors only deepen this chasm between high school and college, via instant immersion in highly compartmentalized nomenclature.

And then, there's all the alcohol in your freshman year...you know, the beverages that are supposed to be difficult to obtain because you're underage, but in reality easily procured and over-consumed.