Disclaimer! Please take some of this advice with a grain of salt.
Step 1: Organization is key.
Make sure before you come to college you invest in an insane quantity of studying and organization materials, including at least 20 different colored pens, a half dozen notebooks (one for each class you’re taking), a full-size designer planner, several books of post it notes, and three different calendar white boards. After about three weeks of classes you’ll be down to one pencil that is running out of lead and two pens, one of which sputters when it writes, two notebooks because you realized only one of your freshman level classes actually requires you to take notes (the other one is for doodles in the other classes), and you’ve forgone your bulky planner for an app on your phone. The sticky notes will go unused and your white board calendar may be updated once a month. Your desk will become piled with books and random papers and you will cry.
Step 2: Go out of your way to make friends.
It may be tempting to sit in your dorm room and watch hours of YouTube while simultaneously ignoring all your responsibilities, but you can do the same thing by having friends and going on a three-hour Walmart shopping trip! Just make sure you don’t make friends with your prissy roommate’s friends because while they might say they like your more, they’ll tell your roommate everything you told them about her and eventually those “friends” will stop talking to you for no reason whatsoever! Instead, make friends with the people in your extracurriculars, like choir or Greek life, and still be emotionally distant and anxious that they don’t like you and talk behind your back. You will still spend hours by yourself in your roommate-less room, in the dark, and cry.
Step 3: Make sure you eat regularly.
Nothing in life is more important than taking care of yourself, physically and mentally. That means eating regularly and healthily. If you are going to be eating at a dining hall, make sure that you don’t load up on the unlimited fries and ice cream every day, and instead look toward the salad bar where you’ll slowly begin to hate the color green and everything related to leafy plants. Be careful not to take advantage of the school's snack bar! It’s very tempting to go and get chicken tenders and fries or a milkshake at 9:00 after laying in the dark for hours and missing the dining hall hours, but stay strong! It’s no fun running out of dining dollars and then having to use your own money for your fry addiction. Because after you get to your dorm and scarf down those chicken tenders, you’ll cry.
Step 4: Don’t be afraid to take classes about things you’re passionate about, even if it has nothing to do with your major!
Your brother is a college dropout, jobless, and in massive amounts of student debt, and you’re a reluctant business major with the expectations of your entire family on your shoulders, but that doesn’t mean you should focus on starting the dreaded classes for your major when you can take three different art classes! Just make sure you’re ready for when your relatives eventually grill you and ask why you're wasting your time in college on a class that only focuses on Shakespearean tragedies. The important thing is that you’re engaged in a class you’re passionate about. Save the boring, excruciatingly difficult classes for when you’re an upperclassman and genuinely dead on the inside, spending every break between classes crying.
And finally, the most important step…
Step 5: Remember that everyone makes mistakes and it’s okay to fall off the wagon.
It’s okay to mess up your first year of college. Most students haven’t been prepared for the workload and the sudden independence that being a college freshman entails. The most you can do is try your hardest and enjoy yourself. There is a balance between social life and academia, and sometimes it might tip one way or the other. You just have to keep picking yourself up when you fall down, and try not to beat yourself up. Humans make mistakes. College students make even more mistakes. College freshman make the most mistakes. You can’t learn if you don’t make those important mistakes. So I implore you to learn. Learn how to take care of yourself. Learn where your limits are. Learn what kind of people you need in your life, and when to say enough is enough in certain situations. And most importantly, learn that it’s okay to cry once in a while.
