Dear Incoming Freshmen,
You finally made it! After all of these months waiting since you got the acceptance letter from your favorite college. You've spent the entire summer patiently counting down the days until you would say goodbye to the only place that you have called home all of your life (or in the last couple of years), while worrying about the next four years of your life.
"What If I don't make any friends?" You may ponder to yourself as you are driving out of your house for the very last time (for the next couple of months, anyway), with all of your stuff with you. As you approach the dorm you're going to be staying at for nine months, you start to look around at a bunch of unfamiliar freshmen moving huge, gigantic things in with their parents. Then the unpacking of your mother's 1999 Dodge Caravan happens, and you meet your roommate for the first time, along with her parents, and suddenly you've made your first friend on campus. You are a kid in a candy store, looking around at the amazing environment you've decided to place yourself in for the next four years of your life.
Maybe not everyone's story plays out like the one that was described above. Maybe you won't get along with your roommate like everyone else in the hall has. Guess what? That's okay, because college will be one of the best experiences that will ever happen in your life. You will meet people that will turn out to be your best friends for life. You'll spend hours doing homework at the library, and spending the weekends out at parties or hanging out with your friends.
The best advice that anyone could give you to survive these next four years is to be yourself. You will have friends come and go in your life; you'll have friends that will be either good or bad influences. However, never change just because someone wants you to. Be yourself and don't care what others think of you. As a freshman, you have the next four years to find someone that's right for you and make friends.
Another bit of advice is: don't procrastinate!
College is a lot harder than high school ever was. You have to study twice as much as you ever did in high school just to get an A on a test—and you might not even get that A on a test with all of the studying that you have done. Pushing that huge economics project aside until the last minute possible will make your life very stressful. Finals week? Don't even get me riled up about that. It's the hardest week of the year for any college student; once it's all over, though, you will gladly take a nap, and be relieved it's all over. If you need help, go see a professor in their office hours—they are there to help you.
Honestly, college is going to be the best four years of your life. By the end of college, you won't be the same person that you were when you were first entering college.
It will be the wildest, craziest, best four years of your life.
