I always imagined college being this time when you had so much freedom to do what you wanted and everything would come easy and it would all work out. Boy was I wrong!
I knew that college would be a challenging time filled with living arrangement transitions, challenging classes, and deciding what you wanted to do with your life. For me, the part on deciding what I wanted to do was easy. I've known that I want to work in the medical field for a while, and now I get to pursue it! When I thought about the challenging classes I thought that I would able to get through them if I just tried my best and worked hard.(For the most part I did). For the living transitions, I knew from the start that it was going to be tough. I was leaving the comforts of my home to live with someone in a small space when I was always used to having a room to myself. That was a little challenging, but I made it through.
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However, I believe the most challenging thing for me was trying to use all of my free time wisely. There were some days that I would have only one class a day, and the rest was up to me to figure out. I didn't have a car with me, so going somewhere wasn't an option, I have so much homework to do, but who wants to do homework when there's Netflix shows to watch? There were so many times that I found myself saying, "I'll just watch one more episode and then I'll start studying or doing homework," or "It's 4:30 now, I'll start my homework at 5:30." Another hard thing about having so much free time was that when assignments had due dates that were 2 weeks away, there was no rush to do them, which meant procrastinating until the last minute to do them in order to take time and do something more "fun".
After learning what works and does not work for me when it comes to using my time wisely and how to have more freedom with my schedule, I think I will have a little bit of an easier time second semester since I will start out knowing all of this instead of learning it in the middle of the year. It was a little stressful, it still is, but I hope as time goes on, it will get a little easier.
