I think everyone goes into college with a picture perfect image of what the next four years is going to be like, which is probably filled with meeting new cool people, going to themed parties and eating really unhealthy food at an unreasonable hour. College is supposed to be the best four years of your life and they are for the most part, but nothing is ever perfect. One thing that everyone neglected to tell me when going to college was that college is hard. The workload in college is very different from high school and the adjustment does not always come easy to everyone.
College freshmen are essentially thrown into the world of college and forced to figure it out. Although college is the time to be independent, the path to independence is difficult. It is hard to manage your time and classes that are all so different in an environment you are still new to. My freshman year of college was incredibly difficult for me because I was still trying to figure everything out. I was trying to meet new friends, trying to be on good terms with all my professors and trying to keep my homesickness to a minimum.
Despite my efforts, I did not do as well as I would have liked in my classes. I would study for hours and hours on end and still end up with a bad grade, which really was a hard hit to my confidence. I always excelled in school and when I started doing poorly, I felt like a failure. Nothing is worse than trying so hard to succeed and failing continuously. I think there were definitely some parts of my freshman year where I just gave up. What is the point of trying when I am going to fail, anyway? Since this was my new mentality, I lost my confidence and with that, I lost my ability to care.
The issue with not caring is the reflection it has on you as a whole. A person who does not even bother trying loses by default. I realized that it was better to try and to fail than to not try at all. I decided I was not going to let my own insecurity of not being intelligent stop me from being intelligent anyway. I started telling myself I was smart everyday in order to boost my self-confidence. I started participating more in class and asking questions because I needed to become the best I could be. Almost a fake-it-'til-you-make-it strategy became my life line. The more I believed in myself, the better I started performing in school.
College is not easy, but neither is life. You have to fight for it hard if you want to succeed. It is easy to fail. It's easy to admit defeat, but as humans, it is still our prerogative to persevere. At the end of the day, no one is going to save you from your sinking ship; you need to save yourself. The biggest thing that my struggles in college has taught me is to never stop trying and to never give up on myself. There is a quote that goes, "It's not how many times you get knocked down that count, it's how many times you get back up." So no matter what just try and keep getting up, because one day you will succeed.
