You drive up to the place you will call home for the next four years, not knowing how to get around, where to go, or anybody to talk to for that matter. Pulling into the parking lot to unload all of you dorm room necessities — for some reason you thought 20+ pounds of food was needed despite the dining hall on campus — and realizing you finally made it.
If your first-week college experience was, or will be, anything like mine, you will be laden with all kinds of emotions: fear, excitement, anxiety, sadness, the list could go on for the entirety of this article. In just a few short hours your parents would have left, and unfamiliar faces, in an unfamiliar and intimidating environment, would surround you. Everything you had known just left in a car to travel back to your old home and yet that is just the point, it is now old.
The first week at college, despite how scary it may seem to be quite literally dropped into a place with nobody at your side, is detrimentally important to how the rest of your college experience will pan out. Amidst all the orientation foolishness — hours upon hours of embarrassing ice-breakers only serve as fuel to the fire — and scheduled dinners, you make your first college memories.
These memories prove to be the ones you almost always look back to months down the road. When you are eating another dining hall meal you can’t stand yet also can’t seem to put down, you and your friends will say something along the lines of “remember the first day?”
You will look back on the first time you slept in your dorm room along with your roommate and the fear of what the next day will bring, and you will look back at the lifelong friends you made the first week. Reminiscing about the first time you and a group of people went out during the first weekend, the first time you went to a sporting event, and the first time you met every one of your friends.
These memories will remain throughout your four years of college despite what you may think. Even if your first week was bad and you wished to start the trek back to the comfort of your hometown, it got better. Little by little you started to feel more comfortable in the environment that surrounded you, and you started to make more and more connections with people who you would spend four years of your life with.
The first week was so vitally important in that it set me, and likely everyone else, up for the rest of my time at college. How you act in the first week should be the way you act the rest of your college experience. As cliché as it may sound, you truly do need to be yourself. This does not mean you go crazy, pretending to be someone you aren’t just to make quick friends.
The memories you make in the first week take time. Ignore the feelings of anxiety, fear, and panic. Rather, learn to embrace the tiniest fragments of excitement, joy, and pleasure. In doing this, you will make the memories of a lifetime, and make the friends who will be by your side until the end. While the first week came and went, the memories will last forever.
In that time, you managed to create an image of the college experience you wanted all along, and diminished the burdensome thoughts that plagued your mind those precious days and nights.
So, if your first day is yet to come, embrace the feelings of excitement more than the feelings of fear. Do not be afraid to be who you really are those first few important days. Although above all, remember to make the first week the best week you will ever have at your home away from home.
