Over the past year, I have certainly learned a lot about myself as well as grown as a person. I expected college to be different but I was not quite prepared for all the ways in which my life changed.
To begin with perhaps the greatest life change, I was excited to live on my own separate from my parents. I was less excited to be living with 3 other guys in a space about the size of my room at home. I worried that this would impede my ability to function optimally and I couldn’t have been more right. I am an introvert. I “recharge my mental batteries,” as it were, by being alone. Turns out, being alone to recharge is quite difficult in a campus as populated as this and having a crowded room to return to. This easily constitutes the worst aspect of my first year of my college experience. If there was any good at all to come out of my situation, it is that I am motivated to work harder so that I never have to be in similar circumstances again (though I may be next year due to not having any control over my housing assignment).
The second biggest life change was being free to do things the way I wanted to. No parents or teachers nagging me to get work down, but also no parents or teachers reminding me that I needed to get the work done. Learning how to properly manage my time is a skill I’m still working on mastering. I never had any issues in high school getting things done on time and I could usually wait until the last minute and still ace assignments. I found out that this was not the case in college and I needed to schedule my time wisely if I wanted to stay on top of all my schoolwork. While I never needed to pull an all-nighter in order to get all of my work done, I have seen my fair share of hyper-busy Sundays after overly lazy Saturdays. This is something I still need to work on, but I hope that by the end of my next year I will have conquered this flaw.
My participation in the STEM Scholars program over the past year has been… interesting. I haven’t been very involved in the Scholars program and I mostly feel like its requirements are a chore that distract me from my schoolwork. Mostly I feel that the Scholars program isn’t what I was looking for when I joined it. I joined the Scholars program with the intent to improve my scholastic life through academic enrichment. What I’ve found, however, is that the Scholars program is a more social program that encompasses a little bit of everything. I want to spend my time in college focusing on learning, growing, and evolving my knowledge in my specific field. All of the activities required by the Scholars program, while occasionally enriching, seem less important to me than had I spent the time working on more academic endeavors.
Overall, my first year has had its ups and downs. I’ve learned a lot, not just academically, but about myself as well as how the world works. While it has been very difficult for me, I am trying to withhold judgment until all the pieces come together. All I hope for now, is that my time here adequately prepares me for truly moving on into the real world.