Congrats, you made it. No more mom and dad watching over your shoulder to make sure you did your homework, or that you went to bed at a reasonable hour. This is your chance to experience the independence you so desperately crave. While this may all seem exciting, a few words of caution:
1. Despite being independent, you’re not alone.
College is like the first day of preschool again: everyone comes together, and few to no people really know each other before they get there (there are always gonna be those few people who have been best friends since elementary school, but for the rest of us, we are on our own). That being said, friends will come. I made the mistake of worrying too much about whether or not I was going to have friends the absolute first day of school that I almost lost track of who I was as a person, something that has taken me the last year and a half to finally get together. Where I struggled with this was associating that while I was thrilled to finally have my independence, me being independent also meant that I was alone.
This is not the case by any sort of means.
Wanting to be independent and do things on your own is perfectly normal. It wasn’t until second semester of your sophomore year, however, when you realized what being alone was really like. You broke up with your boyfriend, and expected to have no friends whatsoever when you came out of it. Why should you? All you did the whole year previously was leave abandon them whenever your boyfriend wanted to see you.
However, after the break-up, you had more friends than ever. In particular, your roommates and teammates simply scooped you back into their everyday routines and made you one of them. Despite everything that happened, you were never really alone, and be thankful to have such amazing friends as these in your life.
2. The period of self-discovery is inevitable: embrace it.
College is the time to figure out who you really are. With this discovery process, emotions are inevitable. What I realized too late was that when you bottle up these emotions, and neglect to ever really take the time to sit down and figure out what has been going on, they don’t go away. Eventually, they bottle up and get to a point where they lead to something such as a panic attack (although this was by far the lowest point and I had never actually imagined I could get there).
So take the first steps. Go out, experience new things. But at the end of the day, take some time to reflect, and don't let these things build up. If someone does something nice for you, tell them what it meant to you. If you do something you really enjoyed, do it again! If something is bothering you, talk about it and solve the issue right away before it causes more damage than it should. At the end of the day, you're the only one who can be responsible for making yourself happy, and this is the time to really perfect that art!
3. No one cares whether or not you go to class.
That being said, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go. While no one is watching over your shoulder to make sure you are there, for a visual learner like yourself, going to class is the easiest way to both master all of the course material, and do the best that I can on the test.
4. Get in a pattern and stick with it.
One of the biggest struggles of college is time management and figuring out what order to do tasks in and when to do them. When you don’t have a pattern, that next TV show or Netflix episode looks really enticing, and procrastination becomes second nature (if it wasn’t already second nature). However, the more productive you are to start, the more time you’re going to have to do other things that you really want to do. Moral of the story: suck it up, stay organized, and get things done efficiently.
5. Have fun.
I don’t think it you actually realize how short college actually is until it gets to the halfway point. For me, that was the “Oh crap” moment when I realized that I was on the back end of my college years. While the time that I had spent there was great so far, it was at that point that I really sat down and realized just how quickly everything was really going. That being said, embrace every moment, and do things that you enjoy.
All in all, college is fun. Enjoy it, and live a little please!
Love,
Future JFTB
