First year in college, losing motivation?

Student Lounge College Life
1

<p>I don't know what's wrong with me right now, but it seems like all i want to do is have fun and put off work as much as possible. </p>

<p>In high school I was sure I could handle being a premed at UCB, a place notorious for grade deflation. I graduated at the top of my high school class, took 12 AP's, got 5's on all of them except 2, and now looking back, I am amazed at myself for caring so damn much. I used to do nothing else but study and exercise. Now I am a bum. I tried exercising again, and I'm not entirely a blob of tard or anything but I cannot be consistent about it. I have put on about 5 pounds, enough I guess to keep me unmotivated about anything else. I waste my time socializing, eating, sleeping. It seems like I have all this time in the world, yet I find myself completely uninterested in completing my psets for my science/math classes. </p>

<p>I am about to get a 3.3 ish GPA in one of the hardest majors here, yet I can't seem/want to do anything to change it. If I had gotten anywhere near this gpa in high school, i probably would have cried. Actually, i never would have let myself fall this far down in the first place. Everything is so hard. I just don't have the drive to do well anymore, everybody in my physical science classes are all so brilliant, and nothing I can do can ever get in that top decile of the class. It's horrible how in high school I worked so much harder and now that everybody else is working harder than they have in high school, I have lost motivation to work hard, at a time when it really counts. </p>

<p>The thing is though, I don't even know what else I would rather be doing. I just can't care for anything anymore. </p>

<p>Part of it I guess is that I guess after graduation I felt like I had nothing to prove to anybody anymore. I had done what I thought I was capable of doing already, I had proven them wrong. In the back of my mind right now, I know things will be fine, even if I graduate with a 3.0 GPA or whatever. I may not get into med school, I will probably just end up being a lame teacher or social worker or something. Why don't I care anymore? </p>

<p>I do want to do better, but it seems like I don't want it enough to change the person I've become lately. I sound like such a whiney, pathetic, ungrateful dumba$$ right now. I know.</p>

2

<p>hey bud</p>

<p>Get the vision of what you want. You need to have a purpose fueling you.</p>

<p>You need to have a purpose otherwise, you’ll just be floundering around, not knowing why you’re doing what.</p>

<p>Feel how BAD IT WILL SUCK WHEN YOU END UP A LITTLE LOSER BECAUSE YOU DIDNT GET YOUR STUFF HANDLED</p>

<p>Ask yourself, what will happen if I continue to stay like this?</p>

3

<p>What’s your purpose fueling your college journey?</p>

4

<p>Having vision and purpose cant really be described well in words. Words are only signposts.</p>

<p>You have to FEEL it and it has to come from the inside.</p>

<p>You need to lie awake at nite and dream of the amazing things you want to do, like when you were a kid, dreaming crazy dreams that seem almost unrealistic.</p>

<p>You need to get in touch with that place inside of you that has no limits or boundaries. </p>

<p>That little voice inside you that says “you will do something amazing”</p>

<p>That little voice might be stifled now, but you can gain a clearer connection to it when you start loving yourself aka self-respect.</p>

<p>Only you can know what you dream of on the inside, so dont look for others to tell you what to dream of.
Let that purpose fuel you, and when you feel scattered, remind yourself of it.
My vision involves college glory, and spreading that love.</p>

<p>So rather than thinking hard about it, allow yourself to feel.</p>

5

<p>Listen to “til I Collapse” by Eminem- it’ll get you pumped up. </p>

<p>Goodluck.</p>

6

<p>Do you know if you want to go into the medical field? Maybe that’s what’s wrong. If you don’t really want to major in whatever you’re majoring in, or if you don’t know what you want to do, it can be hard to motivate yourself. Especially when your classes are very hard, even for general education requirements. For me, I feel like I’m just doing busy work. I have a general idea of things I’d like to major in, but nothing clear-cut. As such, I feel like I’m in the 13th grade of high school… doing work “just cause.”</p>

7

<p>

</p>

<p>I think I know what the problem is:</p>

<p>Okay, so you graduated at the top of high school(Which you included in your essay, like it was some sort of bragging title) and now you got into College and realize that the workload was much harder. </p>

<p>And then you come in saying that “You are in one of the hardest majors” and that your Freshman-Level Math/Science classes are just so hard and that everyone else is doing well because they are brilliant. </p>

<p>Here are some things that might help you:</p>

<p>A. People do not get high grades in College because they are smart. People get high grades in College because they work hard. Every single day, they do homework and problem sets for 3-4 hours including the weekends. The time will vary depending on the University and obviously at some University’s you will need a much higher time commitment.</p>

<p>You may/may not have figured this out in high school. But my hunch is that you didn’t realize just how much time you have to spend to an A grade in all of your courses in College.</p>

<p>B. College is not the same as High School. It could be different depending on where you went to High School, but chances are High School is MUCH easier to succeed academically than College. </p>

<p>C. I am guessing that you worked pretty hard in high school(To be quite honest- I did not) and now that you are in College you are getting a little more tired. It happens with the people who must absolutely get a 4.0 GPA or else the world will crumble around them- They do bad on a test or homework assignment and then they fall apart.</p>

<p>D. Succeeding in the real world and becoming a Doctor means that you will have to go through a lot of work. If you can’t find the motivation to get a High GPA as a Freshman in College(In Which, many of the courses just end up getting harder and harder) then how are you going to succeed in medical school? How are you going to succeed while in the operating room? Have you seriously thought the whole process out?</p>

<p>So many people declare Pre-Med at the beginning of the College and then only a small fraction of these people succeed and get into medical school.</p>

<p>If you really want to become a doctor and get into medical school then you know what you need to do.</p>

8

<p>School has the tendency to do that to people. Basically you have to realize all the work you did in high school is now completely irrelevant. You’re starting all over and everyone has a clean slate. It is depressing, but just try to keep your grades above a 3.0 and you’ll be fine.</p>

9

<p>Axion004,</p>

<p>You were right about 1) feeling tired after working so hard in high school and 2) i didn’t realize how hard I really needed to work to get A’s in college.</p>

<p>Just because I know I am tired/not doing enough doesn’t mean I can easily fix it.</p>

<p>I am doing biochemistry, god knows Berkeley is not an easy place for that. i am not saying everybody in my classes is brilliant, just enough of hardworking/naturally brilliant people with better science backgrounds than i do to keep me from getting good grades. i heard people at their schools got 5’s on AP science exams and could still wind up with a C+ in their classes. at my high school, i’ve known a few poeple who got A’s in our AP classes and still got 3’s on the AP exams. But see, I thought it didn’t affect me as much as it did, since I had done well in the classes and on the exams. But I guess it has made me a lot more impatient in the sense that I always received a good “return” when I worked hard.</p>

<p>The thought of working hard and still ending up “mediocre” has kept me from dedicating myself 100% to what I do now. Pathetic, I know.</p>

<p>It’s not like I don’t work at all now, i’ve been putting in a lot of hours, but it seems like my heart’s not in it anymore. I don’t work with the same urgency as I did in high school. I don’t stress out about not getting things done anymore, I don’t miss out on sleep just to read my textbooks anymore. Schoolwork has always been some sort of busywork for me, though at some intervals, I did feel some sort of intellectual fulfillment. Whether that fulfillment has been in science is debatable. The places science can bring me are more alluring than the prospect of actually studying science, for right now at least.</p>

<p>I am just lost. I don’t know what I want to do with my life. So I’ve been deluding myself with things that bring me instant gratification. I used to hate people like that, and now I am one of them.</p>

10

<p>I had the exact same feelings and thoughts as you about 2-3 weeks ago. I had C’s in calc and chem (I’m engineering, btw) and was doing mediocre in my other classes. I seriously lost all motivation to study; I kept asking myself “whats the point of all this? screw it, i’ll do fine on the exam!” and ended up with C’s on both. I was a fairly hard worker in high school also (especially junior year), and sort-of tried senior year. Now that I was in college, I didn’t know why I bothered studying so much at all. </p>

<p>Then I was talking about this to some upperclassmen and they said they experienced the same things in freshman year too; they told me to take on a “just do it” attitude and flow with it. NONE of this stuff you learn in college helps you in real life; they’re just there so you can work your ass off for four years and get a piece of paper saying that you’re smart and capable for a real-world job. Also, my parents are paying my tuition off their retirement money, so its my obligation to pay them back later…and I can’t if I flunk out of college. This is seriously what motivates me.
I’ve been doing a LOT better in the past two weeks, grades bumped up a lot and I think I’ll make it through this semester. Next semester should be a fresh start, won’t mess things up that time.</p>

11

<p>I think I’ve lost motivation…</p>

<p>I went to a school that I was pressured into attending by an insistent parent and it offered me a generous scholarship which is nice…but I could have gone to a much better school. I’m not doing as well as I hoped to and I’m now stuck at a no-name liberal arts school in the south (I didn’t even want to go south in the first place) where I’ll get a science degree that’s worth practically nothing and end up stuck in a career path that’s not for me…help :(. I started well and now everything’s crashing around me. The plan was to go to graduate or professional school afterward but now I’m thinking that I should just become an engineer or comp sci major and just get a nice paying job after I graduate >_>. I’m so sick of school.</p>

12

<p>just transfer into another school.</p>