School is done.. now what? Recap

Hey everyone! I just finished my first year as a student at the College of the Holy Cross, or Holy Cross for short. So what has happened throughout the first year as a student? My first year went overall, OKAY, not that great, not terrible. What made the experience for me “okay” was not the college life or anything, but simply the grades. I’m a very grade orientated person and I would have had a much better year if I got better grades. I ended up with pretty much straight Bs throughout the whole year, and only B’s during spring semester. My GPA at the end of this year is a 3.2, so not that great because I’m hoping to improve to a 3.5 at least by the end of sophomore year.

Some recap:

The Classes/Professors: I found adjusting to my classes to be one of the new experiences that felt weird to adjust. Going to college on your own is different than high school classes, your professor won’t know your name unless you go talk to them in office hours or become an active participant when they ask questions. It’s not like high school where you have a close relationship with your teachers and they know your name by the end of the week (although most professors here know your name within two weeks or so depending on your class size). After this year, I feel much more comfortable getting to know my professors personally, and I’m going to try to for next semester to go to more office hours, or to at least visit once.

The Roommate: When you get a roommate who you’ve never known your whole life in the beginning of the year, it’s going to feel weird that you’re going to be suddenly living with them for a whole year. There are some ground rules you should probably clear with your roommate and what I experienced was a bit of a handful. You two (or three) need to adjust to each others sleep patterns, which for me and my roommate we had no problem. Although there is also a noise/how deep of a sleeper you are that factors into this, because if you can sleep through anything like me, you won’t care what your roommate does. However, my roommate was a really sensitive sleeper and light and noises could have woken him up so I had to be really quiet or stay somewhere else until he slept. The cleanliness of the room was another thing that I just want to mention. My roommate was messy and left stuff on the floor and his side often got messy compared to mine, but I’m a really flexible person so I didn’t mind that much. If you get a messy roommate, I’d just say that you should learn to be a bit flexible and sometimes remind your roommate to clean up his/her side. I became pretty close to my roommate and we were good friends (though I’m not rooming with him next year), I learned to be more flexible with his habits and I got a new friend with amazing musical tastes and an awesome library of songs.

The Whole “Freedom”, I’m On My Own Now: Well this is going to feel quite different for different kinds of people. If you’ve been to boarding school, been comfortable living alone, been fine without your parents for long periods of time, I don’t think much would change for you. If you’ve been sheltered your whole life and never allowed to go to a sleep over like some of my friends, then you’re going to be in for a huge change that you’ll need to adjust too. I’ve always been fine on my own as long as there was food to eat and a good internet connection, so it didn’t feel much different to me. Some others will be home sick a lot or just not know what to do with themselves, others will go wild with the new found freedom and party it up and let their grades suffer. I just kept on doing things like I normally did in high school, except maybe procrastinate more than I should have.

The Distance: You move into a new culture is what happens when you move into college. For me, I was submerged into this new College Life scene and it felt weird to be surrounded by new people. Once I adjusted and accepted the stereotypical culture I just weaved my way around the scenes that I didn’t want to be a part of and staid for the funner parts. However, when I moved back home, things were so much different and so many things had changed around my home town even though it wasn’t very far away. I’ll probably make a separate post about this, but I felt really out of place when I came back home, like I was in a limbo between my teenage years and adulthood. When you move to college and move back, you’ll notice a big difference in your hometown, the people, the old friends and acquaintances, the buildings, the workplace, the restaurants, the stores and all the little things you didn’t notice before but you notice now and its changed.

These are just some of the things I though I’d recap you on for the freshman year. I’m currently back at school doing research with one of my professors and I’ll update you on that soon!

Enjoy your summer!

Dan Luu

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2012 at 4:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.