During your first year of college, you learn more about yourself than you had ever realized there was to know. You grow up so much that you look back on the person you were before moving into college and wonder who that person was.
In your first year of college, you will change friend groups perhaps ten times. It may take until the end of the year before you find friends who you truly click with. In most cases, the friends you had the first week of college are not people you will still be in contact with by the end of the first year.
In your first year of college, you will not only change friend groups, but you may change roommates, majors, and classes. The first year of college is all about figuring yourself out, and deciding what you want to do with your life. First-year college students are known for regularly changing their major. If you are anything like my roommate, you will change your mind about what you want to do as your career, and debate switching majors, minors, and concentrations on a daily basis.
In your first year of college, you will learn how you work best, whether you like short classes that meet three times a week, or longer classes that meet once or twice a week. You will learn whether you prefer morning, afternoon, or evening classes. The mistakes you make in your first year of college will teach you life-long lessons. I learned, for example, that two-and-a-half hour classes that meet once a week are not for me. I prefer one-hour-and-fifteen-minute classes that meet twice a week. I think fifty-minute long classes that meet three times a week are too short; there isn’t enough class time to really get into the material.
Perhaps the most important thing you learn in your first year of college is how to live on your own. The first year of college is a time of struggling to provide for yourself. If you run out of something, like toothpaste or snacks, you have to replace it yourself. This can be a tough adjustment not only financially, but just in general. Remembering to purchase the items at the store that you need shows how your responsibilities have increased since coming to college.
Living at college means living on your own, which most of us have never done before. The college conditions in which you live and work mold you into an adult, with or without your conscious approval. Your first year of college forces you to mature and become more responsible, perhaps without you even noticing, until you stop and look back at how far you have come.
