I attended a very small, private, Catholic, high school, with my graduating class being twenty-something people. I had always pictured myself ending up in a large college, like the ones you see in movies. What never hit me was how different of a change it would be until it got to orientation.
Growing up at my high school was an interesting experience. I was one of only 2 colored people, I was the only Muslim student, and my career interests stood out among everyone else's.
Fitting in was never an issue for me, I have always been on the extroverted end of the introverted scale, and never had difficulty making friends, especially when the size of our school was so small. Majority of my grade was made up of people who had been at this school since elementary or middle school, and I was one of those people.
Being in such a small class size, you learn that there is no running away from your problems or conflicts with people.
Whether it is a fight or a grudge you are holding, or a breakup or crush that you have on someone that gets exposed, you have to deal with it and move on.
After graduating, I realized this was a skill that I learned in high school that most college students do not have because being from a bigger high school, you have the ability to avoid problems and simply get new friends. At my high school, our entire grade became a family by the time it was my junior year, and that is something huge that most high schools lack.
While transitioning, I was afraid of what people would think of me. Not knowing how to dress everyday for school because I had uniforms in high school, how hard it would be to make friends because I had the same ones all four years of high school, and how scary it would be when it came to navigating the campus because there were only two floors of a building that my high school ever used.
During orientation for UK I kept my cool, but I was so overwhelmed just looking at the crowd of people in the audience. I could feel my heart and thoughts racing, my stomach full of anxiety days until the first day of school, questioning if this was actually the right decision for me. I was afraid that I would have to start over or that I would have to attend a smaller, local school near my hometown.
When school finally started, I realized that college was much different than I had imagined. It was so easy to make friends because most of the freshman are on the same page as you where they do not know anyone on campus either and are looking to meet new people. Introductions were easy to do and almost became a routine for all of my freshman year, and no one ever cared what you looked like for school.
My strategy if I ever felt overwhelmed by class sizes was to sit in the front so that I would not have to look at how big the class was, and it turned out helping me stand out and have a better relationship with the professors where they know me by name. Knowing where everything was, became a lot easier, there are signs everywhere and once I got used to the walking paths, it felt as if the campus was getting smaller. I became comfortable.
I now realize that adapting to an environment that you are not used to may seem stressful at first, but once you dive in and experience it, everything becomes much easier naturally.
