As I relax in my living room at home next to a glowing Christmas tree, sipping my hot chocolate and listening to Christmas carols, I have time to reflect on my first semester in college. Of course, my mind should be on non-school related subjects, but I can't help but think of the time I spent the last few months in college. It went by fast. Really fast. I feel like it was just yesterday that I was unloading my things into my dorm and crying as I watched my parents drive away. Now it's Christmas. Where did all the time go?
Your first semester of college is a rollercoaster. It moves fast and there are many ups and downs. You are sad, excited, stressed, happy, and tired all at the same time. By the time you get off the rollercoaster you're not sure what happened, you feel a little sick, and you may have thrown up a few times along the way. You stagger out, the world spinning. The experience and the fast paced nature of it may have made you dizzy.
I joked with my friends that my college motto would be "I have no idea what I'm doing." While said as a joke, this actually holds a lot of truth. Going into my first semester I really had no idea what I was doing, and I still don't. I didn't know what to expect going into classes, and being a roommate, and cooking in the dorm, and trying to make new friends. I learned some of these things, but I have by no means perfected them. There is no revelation that one has after the first semester, that you are now fully equipped to be an adult and make decisions and pay bills and have a job. You still will not know everything.
By the end of the first semester I had debunked the myth that college is like one big party all the time. This is not the case. There are fun times, for sure, but there are also a lot of late nights studying and afternoons spent alone in your room watching Netflix. In one semester you may not have made a lot of friends, or gotten straight A's, or eaten the healthiest of foods, but this does not mean you are a failure. You are learning. I felt a little uncertain after my first semester, like maybe I wasn't doing college right or like I wasn't really ready to be on my own, but the thing is, no one is. No one has perfected "adulting" and no one ever will. Your first semester was trial and error. You learned what worked and what didn't. If you don't like how this semester went, change it for next semester. You have the power to make your college experience whatever your want it to be. It is an adventure and a learning experience and it will go by fast, so seize the day and conquer it, even if you don't know exactly what you're doing.
