As my last undergraduate semester quickly approaches, I’m realizing that for the first time in a while, I’m able to look at my college experience with a lot of clarity. Winter break has given me a good pause to reflect on what went well, what went terribly, and what I wish I knew going into these last four years. I really believe that my reflections on that last category could help provide some insight and perspective for anyone who was as terrified as I was going into the whole experience. Take everything with a grain of salt — none of these lessons/warnings/takeaways/whatever you want to call them are universal, but I do think they provide a good balance to the plethora of the more “typical college experience” advice out there.
Continue reading “Retroactive Advice for College Freshman Me”Tag: freshman
So, How is College?
Coming home from college after your first semester is full of catching up on sleep, reconnecting with high school friends, and answering the dreaded “so…how is college?” question. To be perfectly honest, I dreaded this question for the longest time, for college hasn’t been anything like I thought it would be. In a lot of ways, my first few months at William and Mary have been amazing, and in other ways, they have challenged me in ways I didn’t think I could handle. Answering this loaded question can’t be done with a simple explanation, so I figured I’d come on here and write about it to try to put into words the craziness that has been the past four months of my life. Let’s go piece by piece.
No Time to Mull
For weeks now, I have been looking forward to this moment. I am sitting in the window seat on my train home to Pennsylvania, listening to Allen stone, and doing one of my favorite things in the world: writing. Most people would think of a 7-hour trip home as exhausting and boring, but for me, these next 7 hours are going to be extremely therapeutic.
During my past month and a half at William and Mary, I haven’t had much time to write. Any free minute I got was spent either catching up on Dancing with the Stars or playing Heads Up with my hallmates, and I wasn’t able to dedicate a solid chunk of time to writing. I’m happy I was present in those moments, but holy moly, I really missed the feeling of spilling my heart out via keyboard.
While I’d love to outline all the crazy, amazing experiences I’ve had over the past few weeks, I’d rather save those stories for my in-person interactions with everyone from home. The one point I want to focus this post on is a theme that has been really prevalent in my past few weeks, and one that has made me have a bit of a paradigm shift: There isn’t enough time in college to mull over your emotions, and I can’t tell if that’s super healthy or super unhealthy.
Keep the Curtains Open 