Should I Even Try?

Student Lounge College Life
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So, Freshman year is over and to say the least, I really messed up. I came into college with the mindset that my high school prepared me well enough because they always said the students of our school seemed to be the most prepared. The thing that screwed me over was in high school I didn’t really have a social life. This was due to many reasons. In college, I found people I clicked with and my social life was sky rocketing. I could finally say I was happy, something I could never say in high school. With all of this going on, I forgot about academics. I’m ending my freshman year with a GPA lower than a 2.0. My parents don’t know because I’m embarrassed, I graduated High School with over a 4.0. My major is Health Sciences and I’m hoping to go into medical school but I know I won’t get accepted at this rate. I know I screwed up, but I feel like I can’t fix it. I’m retaking a course I failed this semester over the summer because I know I can get an A in it. I’m retaking a course I should have received an A in next semester instead of a C-, but I just found out I ended chemistry with a D this semester too. Retaking these courses are going to put me behind and I don’t even know if medicine is something I want to do.

Chemistry is not my passion. I hate it. I love biology however, and I love the idea of working in a hospital helping people and saving lives. The pressure in my family to be a doctor is insane. I have considered switching into brain and behavioral sciences in psychology because psychology is also something I’ve always loved, but I’m not sure it’s something that would make me enough money to pay back all the loans. I’m honestly just so lost and feel so hopeless at this point. I’ve talked to my adviser multiple times and she always makes me feel worse going out of our meetings. My parents deserve so much better than this and I honestly don’t know if I have what it takes in me.

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Parent talking here… You are not the first person to tank their freshman year. You can recover, but it will take alot more hard work and dedication than you’ve put into your studies so far. You need to find balance between academics and socializing … but while you’re in the recovery phase, the balance needs to shift heavily back to academics. You need to do some serious soul searching and planning. You need to be honest with yourself and with your parents about what happened, and really ferret out the reasons why – what specific things should you have done that you didn’t? Why didn’t you do a serious course correction after your first semester? What specific changes are you going to commit to going forward? Write them down. Sign them. Give a copy to your parents. Post a copy by your desk. Perhaps you need some time away from school to work and get some perspective. Or, perhaps you need to keep going, but take a different mix of classes and build some confidence. If you do continue after the summer, I’d strongly suggest you get yourself a tutor, if only to have someone besides yourself to whom you are accountable on a regular basis for how you’re doing. The trend from here on out needs to be strongly positive; if you can do that, showing steady improvement to really good performance in your final two years, you will be able to make a strong argument for your academic readiness for grad school, and will have developed some strong positive character traits along the way. Don’t excuse your failures this year; take responsibility for them, own up to them, learn from them, fix them, and grow from them. If you do that, then you will have learned alot more than will ever be captured by a gpa on a transcript.