This year was an entirely new experience for me. It was similar to what I imagine culture shock to be like. I knew I always wanted to go to college because I fell in love with learning new things, and a university was the place to do that. The challenge at OSU was expected, even if I wasn’t completely prepared for it.
I was never pushed past my capabilities in high school, not that it wasn’t challenging, I just never was challenged so harshly that I felt that I was incapable of completing a course. My first semester at OSU I dropped a chemistry class. I was not doing as well as I wanted to, even if I knew is was a “weed-out” class. I felt as if I was not going to do better no matter how hard I tried, and I struggled with this for a while before I realized that just because I didn’t do very well in a science course, it didn’t mean that I didn’t belong in college level courses.
The next semester I ended up taking more credit hours in total and did fine in all of those classes. This helped me to regain my confidence in my ability to keep up with the college work load I was expected to keep up with. I also took more classes that pertained to my major and minor areas of study, so I was more interested and involved in them.
I discovered that I really enjoy learning languages and that I want to be learning them for the rest of my life. I want to study several languages and to be able to travel in order to improve my language skills for the rest of my life, be it through my career or outside of it. Eventually I would love to live in the countries in which the languages I have studied are commonly spoken. I would like to begin languages in school then continue my studies on my own or through other resources.
My studies should help me to get to my main goal: to travel and experience cultures different from my own, and help to promote peaceful relations in tense situations.