What I Learned My Freshman Year

By Christina Oehler on July 6, 2014

I heard so many different stories about what to expect my freshman year. I heard about the crazy parties, challenging classes and homesickness that are inevitable your first year away from home. I was told it would be the best year of my life, a time where social life would be just as demanding as school work. There were also so many parts of my freshman year that I was warned about: keep up with school work, go to class, get involved, ect. However, there were a handful of skills I could have only learned through the mistakes I made myself. As cliché as it is, there is no greater teacher than personal experience, and I had plenty of slip-ups to teach me that.

Being organized was first and foremost the most important aspect of my freshman year. I’m not referring to having a clean room, I mean the ability to carefully time manage every event and activity on your schedule. Within the first few months of college, I had already taken on three different extracurricular activities, plus an entire set of college courses. I missed plenty of meetings and deadlines before I realized I had an intensely busy schedule. It’s vital to create a strict calendar with all the dates, times and locations for every activity. I recommend using a planner and coloring certain activities different colors. This helps for keeping deadlines straight and allows you to note day-to-day tasks that need to be completed.

As a journalism major, most of my activities and classes involved interviewing people who were much more intelligent than me. I was lucky enough for professors, upperclassmen and business professionals to allow me to interview them. Regardless of your major, every college student will run into an interview or situation where they will be required to act in a professional manner. This means being on time, appropriately dressed and cordial while in these situations. My first few interviews were daunting- although I had interviewed in the past, this was an entirely new level. I definitely made a ton of mistakes at first, and probably annoyed a handful of busy professors, but as the year progressed I learned the best way to handle these situations is to come prepared and be confident.

The most important thing I learned, however, was that this is my freshman year of college. Having older friends, I obsessed over their college stories and experiences. I thought freshman year would be just like what they told me. So as you can imagine, I began my freshman year waiting for these experiences to happen to me. As the semester rolled by, I realized I was too focused on having the perfect freshman year experience, and I was letting the year pass me by. I realized I needed to bloom where I was planted, and make the best of what I was given. This lesson took me the longest to learn, but I finally found happiness through just letting myself live the life I was put into, not a life that I could create myself.

Up until my freshman year of college, I have never experienced something that has pushed me so far out of my comfort zone. There were so many days I begged my parents to let me come home, but forcing myself to make the best out of an unfamiliar situation made me a more experienced young adult, one who will now know how to deal with situations more maturely and confidently than before.  I cannot honestly say I loved every moment of my freshman year, but I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.  Freshman year is for learning and growing, and everyone will find their own way through it.

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