My dad used to tell me not to expect college classes to be as easy as my high school classes had been. He wasn’t trying to be discouraging; he merely wanted to prepare me - something he had tried to do my entire life. And I’m not saying the classes aren’t challenging, but they’re hardly what make college what it is. Adjusting to new people and a new life is.
School is nothing new, we’ve all been sitting in classes and studying all night for tests for years now. Meeting teachers and the classic icebreakers we do in class is not news. However, college is a whole new ball game when it comes to what you do outside of class. For one, I have so much more free time than I thought possible, certainly way more than I did in high school. But, I don’t have the same friends to hang out with. I have all this time and a whole new group of ways to possibly fill it with. It is in this time that I began to figure out who I was.
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It gave me time to figure out new passions and to pursue new things, but it also gave almost too much time to think. It made me realize that school is not the center of life or the most important part. There are so many things to do and see, so many ways to explore that I would’ve never thought of in high school. Sure, I’m paying money to get an education, but the moments that are making that money worth don’t always happen in the classroom.
The social scene in college is also incredibly different from high school. When you’re in high school you get to separate personal life and school life to a certain degree. You could go to class and then come home and be surrounded by family and distance yourself from the day-to-day life of loud teenagers. But, the uncomfortable or great part of college, depending on whom you’re talking to perhaps, is that your home and your school are one and the same. Life becomes an amalgamation of learning, friendship, romance, extracurricular and home. It’s not impossible to adjust; it just takes more time for some people. If I were to give advice to my friends still in high school, I would tell them not to worry about college, the way so many do. They’ll be fine with the academics. They’ll pass Sociology 101 the same way they passed AP Chemistry. I’d tell them to start thinking about what it is they really want to do. I’d ask them on how they plan to come to terms with humanity outside of the books.
