<p>"Looking back on my own freshman year, there are a ton of things I wish I'd known; they would've saved me a lot of anxiety and confusion."</p>
<p>What insights have you gained from your college career so far?</p>
<p>I just graduated from high school. I like to think I sort of understand what college is like because I have more exposure to it than most people my age, but that probably isn’t true. Last year I took all my classes at a university where most people commuted, and this year I’ll be living with my extended family and commuting to a private school where you can get something closer to the stereotypical “college experience.” I still feel like I don’t need to know about dorms because I won’t be living in one anyway, and lectures about drinking and parties in college seem just as irrelevant as the “peer pressure” lectures in middle school because I don’t think I’ll actually see those things unless I want to, which I don’t. I expect to get a lot smarter, but I think it will be because I’m getting older and not so much because of what happens around me. I expect to learn a lot more about what “the real world” (careers, earning money, etc.) is like. And study abroad would mess with my head a lot, in a good way. But everything is always different than I expect it will be. </p>
<p>So I’m middle-aged and looking back on my past, but I completely agree with the author’s point about being naive. As a senior in high school, I really thought I knew a lot about the world. I was so wrong. I see the same thing in the freshmen that I teach. They come in ready to learn facts, but convinced that their judgment tools are fully developed. Liberal or conservative, this attitude is counterproductive.</p>
<p>I’m NOT saying that everyone entering college is wrong about everything. Obviously that’s not true. At the same time, I think you need to show up ready for the possibility that anything you take for granted COULD turn out to be wrong, or at the very least oversimplified.</p>
<p>For the most part, life after college is pretty un-intellectual. That makes the next four years your last chance to open your mind and challenge your assumptions. And I don’t mean academic stuff only. Your social life should also provide many opportunities to change your mind. If you dig in your heels and refuse to let it happen, you’re going to miss out on a lot that college has to offer.</p>
<p>When you buy something on credit it is not your money. Don’t get yourself into debt to buy fancy clothes, expensive furniture, a fancy car, champagne, women, etc. It’s not worth or it or needed to be successful. </p>
<p>Here’s my perspective after finishing the first year of college:</p>
<h1>2. I would say this is quite true. But unfortunately, as a first-year, college students will treat you as a naive person, and it feels like you’re getting looked down upon… If I word it correctly, they assume you don’t know things and you get those explanations of why things are but you already know that / have thought about that.</h1>
<h1>3 I enjoyed my first semester of college, but it took me to somewhere in the middle of the second semester to get my desired immersion in the college experience (commuter student). Academically, I don’t think it starts until the second year (or third if you have no AP credits or you can’t get classes). I took mostly AP classes in high school and I’d say they are on par with the first year courses at college. That plus you have to do Physics, Chemistry, Calc I/II/III, DEs, random lower division general education courses, etc. Also, 2nd year is when I have to throw in working and resume building into the equation of daily life.</h1>
<h1>4 I remember the summer going into my freshman year and hanging out with college students that just finished their first year. And they’ve changed. As far as not-so-good high school habits, it does take a few weeks to grow out of them.</h1>
<p>I graduated a year ago.</p>
<h1>1 True for me.</h1>
<h1>2 True for me.</h1>
<h1>3 The first paragraph was false and confusing for me. I’m not sure if my college promoted more mixing of class years than the author’s college, but I was surrounded by people of all years – it did not feel like an extension of high school.</h1>
<h1>4 A bit misguided, in my opinion. It’s true that many changes people seem to undergo are gradual. At the same time, certain experiences will cause people to change very suddenly – I think many people will experience at least a few spikes in college. And they can occur freshman year.</h1>
<h1>5 True for me.</h1>
<h1>1: True in some sense. I grew to dislike mathematics by the time I was graduating (I just graduated less than two weeks ago) and was more interested in pursuing an engineering career.</h1>
<h1>2: True. I was very naive. What I wish I would’ve known is to basically study all day every day if I wanted to get good grades.</h1>
<h1>3: I think I screwed up both freshman and sophomore years, but I definitely needed to transfer and reality did set in after my first year.</h1>
<h1>4: I haven’t changed that much. I’m much more mature about certain things, but the person I was coming in is not so different from the person I am coming out as. I never had any profound or life-changing experiences during college. All I did was decide that what I wanted to do initially was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life and acted accordingly. Wasn’t a big deal.</h1>
<h1>5: The only problems I had with people in college were the ones I knew freshman and sophomore year. Eventually I dropped them, transferred out of community college to university, and they all dropped out of community college to sell drugs or mooch off their parents. I may not have liked some professors and their harsh grading.</h1>
<p>I have a few tips to add.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>You do not have the first 2 years of college to figure out your major. You should be volunteering and figuring out what you want to major in now. If you wait thinking that the first 2 years of college will just be general studies, you will risk being a 5-year or 6-year+ college student. A lot of classes require pre-requisites. Figuring out what you want to major in early on will help you stay on track to graduating in 4 years.</p></li>
<li><p>Taking 12 credits a semester is considered full time, but in order for you to graduate in 4 years, you need to average taking 15 credits a semester.</p></li>
<li><p>Don’t wait to transfer colleges. Plan early on because certain credits might not transfer to other schools which will cause you to spend more time in school and you lose money and college credits…</p></li>
<li><p>Just because you’re in college doesn’t mean you stop searching and applying for scholarships. There are still scholarships available that you can apply to while you’re in college so you won’t have to graduate with a lot of student loan debt.</p></li>
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<p>Hope this helps,</p>
<p>What really stuck with me about this article was the point about change and how it happens gradually rather than immediately. </p>
<p>Of course leaving home and living on campus puts you into a brand new situation and forces you to be a bit more independent, but you haven’t really changed as a person just because you live in a new place and have been introduced to new people. </p>
<p>The real changes come with time and personalized experiences that affect how you view yourself and choose to conduct yourself. Freshman year is usually the time when you are just immersed in a whole new culture and all you can really do is soak it in and go with the flow. It is not until a little later that you can actually make sense of the bigger picture and begin to decide for yourself what is important to you and what priorities you need to focus on at this point in your life.</p>
<p>I will be a senior in the fall, and I have had a number of life changing experiences during my time in college. Even the transition from living in a dorm to moving to a house off campus allowed me to grow in ways I did not expect. I have found that even though I have changed and learned things about myself over the last few years, I still do not know everything and I don’t expect to even after I graduate. And I guarantee that I’ll be changing as more time goes on, whether I’m still in school or not.</p>
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<li><p>I’m not sure why this is a “must-know” about coming into college. Your opinions about everything in life will shift and change as you get older, but I don’t know that that’s relevant information for dealing with the college up front.</p></li>
<li><p>I find this amusing, as the author is a rising junior. I’m willing to bet she’s still naive, although perhaps less naive than she was when she first entered. You learn some things about the “real world” in college, but you don’t know a whole lot more at 19 or 20 than you did at 17 or 18.</p></li>
<li><p>What? No. Just because you begin to feel more comfortable and settled in your sophomore year doesn’t mean college hasn’t really “started” until then.</p></li>
<li><p>This is true.</p></li>
<li><p>This is also sometimes true, but it can sometimes be your college’s fault - it depends on what you are angry or upset about.</p></li>
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