<p>I'm curious if anyone else has surprises encountered by their D's/S's in their first semesters at college.</p>
<p>My D:</p>
<p>College: Smith
Surprise: (in a mournful tone) I thought with no ballet rehearsals that I'd have a lot of free time on weekends.</p>
<p>i have an older friend who went to college last year.</p>
<p>College: Cornell
Surprise: if you stay up really late every night partying, chances are you're going to miss a lot of your morning classes!</p>
<p>My son:</p>
<p>College: Bucknell
Surprise: You can still manage to get to Philly, D.C., NYC etc...without a car. You can also amuse yourself on campus even if it is in the wilds of Pennsyltucky.</p>
<p>Looking back I would say my daughters biggest surprise is how well she fit in and how supportive and friendly the atmosphere was.
During convocation she was terrifed as she thought it was way more academic than she was ready for, but her dorm was small, had mostly freshmen and most of them are still really good friends.</p>
<p>My D's roommate:</p>
<p>College: Harvard
Surprise: The roommate was a very high achiever in high school and queen of the social crowd. She is dismayed to find herself merely one of the joes at Harvard. </p>
<p>My D had no such surprise. She was one of the band/orchestra/science kids in high school and had plenty of friends but was not particularly preoccupied with her overall social standing, and she's headed down that same path at college.</p>
<p>An LOL about Babybird's friend.</p>
<p>Coureur, yeah, the extraordinary finding themselves ordinary is an interesting story.</p>
<p>big fish in a small pond becomes big fish in a big pond full of other big fish</p>
<p>People are really short. I'm serious.</p>
<p>My daughter's biggest surprise (RISD) was how hard everyone had to work. Even doing what you want to do gets wearying when you spend 60+ hours at it week after week. But everyone was in the same boat, and they supported one another.</p>
<p>S says that nothing surprised him about college. But I am surprised (happily) by how well he is doing, and his grades (best in his life). Also, that this kid who wouldn't walk two blocks to the grocery store the summer before school started is walking miles a day to classes and the dining halls with no complaints.</p>
<p>My son:
Williams</p>
<p>Positive surprise: Snow is fun (Collorary, Mother was right about wearing a hat!)</p>
<p>Negative surprise: If you start the paper at 11PM the night before it's due, you will not get an A (Collorary, I seem to remember hearing that in highschool as well. . .)</p>
<p>My son
Cornell
I was surprised how many times I caught him online at 3 AM doing school work. Does he sleep?
His surprise was how great the food was.</p>
<p>For former HS oddball nerds like me, being average-- smack in the middle of the pack-- in college was an incredible relief. I felt like I had finally found my people!</p>
<p>SBmom...and then you found your people again...here on CC...the few, the proud, the obsessed.</p>
<p>on the recently completed first semester at W&M:</p>
<p>just because you took a class in high school, and you're taking "the same one" in college, does not mean you get an easy pass! My lowest grades came in calc and chem, the classes that I was already taught everything in, but put no time into during the semester, b/c I figured I already knew it. Wrong.</p>
<p>I think (guessing here) the surprise for my son was the change in circumstances in life from transitioning from HS to college. He was surprised that he could arrange his classes to start at 10 so as not to wake up too early (well, most classes don't start at the godawful hour of 7:30 in the morning) unless he really really wanted a class. He was surprised that he could catch up on sleep in the morning when he had pulled an all-nighter the previous night. He was pleasantly surprised that he did not have his mom around to nag him. The decisions he made are his alone. He is looking forward to living off campus next year (I agreed to it) with 3 other guys and learning to cope on his own.</p>
<p>He is also very surprised how much he loves his classes in college and the academic work. That he picked and chose his own classes in subjects he thought he liked and now really wants to dig deep. Also looking forward to extracurriculars like writing for the campus paper.</p>
<p>My Son
Rice
Academically and socially-- no surprises except the # of Ancient Meditteranean History majors he's met (!)</p>
<p>only surprise-- If you don't lock up your bicycle correctly... and even if you do.. it can sprout legs (he had 2 stolen... :( )</p>
<p>Before finals, the students are given a week off from classes to study. My daughter went skiing. She told me, "You either know it or you don't". She was surprised to learn you actually have to study for finals.</p>
<p>haha! we have a friday and a weekend off before finals, and me and my friends throw a big party. its nice to have some stress relif right before finals. we've done that since freshman year.</p>
<p>I don't know what my son would say to this question, but the biggest surprise to me was that the laundry facilities at his college are superior to those at home--thereby ending a long-running joke in our household about how the laundry was going to get done, who was going to do it, etc. And that so far at least, the dream school has lived up to its reputation and expectations, and then some.</p>