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Your First Days at College

© ML Arthur

It is a hot summer day. You, along with hundreds of other eighteen and nineteen year-olds, are hurriedly pulling cardboard boxes from the trunk and making a bed with your brand-new extra-long sheets. Someone else is doing just the same thing on the other side of your whitewashed room. After a hasty good-bye to your parents, some older student comes by to shepherd you and ten others you have just met to a meeting in an auditorium the size of your high school. You always thought that your first day at college would be something special, that you would feel 'different' or 'more grown-up.' You realize now that the only difference is that you feel lost, confused, and alone.

Four or so years from now, you will walk through the same auditorium in a cap and gown. You will feel so a part of the place that you either will not want to leave or will feel like you are taking a piece of it with you. But right now, you have no sense of that. You question your decision - you wonder whether you would have met people who seemed friendly faster at some other school. All of the older students who are running orientation and registration and activity fairs seem so self-confident. You wonder if you are in the right place.

Almost everyone else sitting in that room with you is feeling just the same way.

Beginning college is tough, a lot tougher than many people make it out to be. Many college students are facing their first time away from their families. Others have not been in a classroom in years. College is often a foreign culture with its own lingo and customs. Students are unsure of their abilities and have to recreate a social circle from scratch. Most students are uncomfortable with their roommates at some point during their first year. It is a little bit harder if you are a foreign student adjusting all at one to a new college and a new culture, or if you are a first-generation college student who can't call up parents and ask for their recollections of this time in their lives, but even those who have the most adjusting to do can find others who are in the same boat to share their difficulties with.

As you sit in that room, don't feel alone. And don't feel discouraged. Know that it will get better with time. After a few days, you will know your way around campus and around the dining hall. Within a few weeks, you will have made good friends. After just a semester (three months), you will know how academics and customs work at your college.

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