When I first stepped on campus last year in August, I honestly had no idea what to expect. I was excited, scared and, unfortunately and unsurprisingly, clueless. I had so many people around me tell me what college was going to be like, but I still felt like I I wasn't ready for anything that was about to come my way in the next couple of weeks and months. However, looking back on my first year of college as a sophomore is actually so rewarding, despite how idiotic I may have felt when I realized that I really didn't know how to study, to how crushing it was to receive my first exam at Hop back only to see a disappointing number scrawled on top.
I'm incredibly thankful for my freshman year because I learned so much. My first semester, I applied to at least fifteen different things, from a cappella groups to jobs at clinics to labs all over Baltimore. I was so focused on getting myself involved with different things that I never stopped to ask myself if I would actually be happy doing any of those things. The lesson I learned from this was to do research beforehand on clubs and organizations before actually committing myself to them. Although I did get to meet a lot of great people doing a bunch of different things, I was mostly overwhelmed and felt like I didn't know which direction I was going toward. Still, because of this happening my freshman year, I now know how to choose what I want to get involved with.
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I'm also thankful for my freshman year because I developed skills that I had never even thought of in high school. I learned how to take notes attentively in lectures, read up on chapters ahead of time and study through a variety of methods (outlines, YouTube videos, class slides and PowerPoints, etc.). Even more, I learned to plan out my week, month and year ahead of time, so I could manage my time more effectively. It was tough going from having a messy dry-erase calendar that I barely updated to an organized online calendar with a color-coded system for all my classes and extracurricular activities, but learning how to do these types of things has been a great, fulfilling part of my experience at Hopkins.
For me, transitioning from high school to college was rough, mostly because everything changed here: the structure of classes, the amount of free time I have, the responsibilities of extracurricular activities and so on. Because of this, freshman year was a source of a myriad of learning opportunities from left to right, and I will never stop being grateful for that.
