Just don't make my mistakes

Dear Incoming Freshman,

            You don’t know me and I don’t know you or what your background is or where you struggle, but I happen to be a pretty observant student, even If I’m not the most diligent. I lived on campus my first year, and with that I witnessed the myriad of problems my housemates struggled with, not to mention my own issues. Just to help you understand who I am, and possibly allow you to perhaps relate to me, I would like to introduce myself. I am an 18-year-old person who graduated high school from the class of 2017. I am a political science major who is sometimes lazy and very often anxious. You can see how these two things could possibly be a major problem. I hope by reflecting on my own first semester and the mistakes I made I can offer you some help.

            I moved into my dorm and made immediate friends with the majority of people in my dorm and everything was hunky-dory. I coasted through much of the first few weeks not realizing that I did in fact need to attend my stats class (even if the professor is nerdy and extremely boring). Please go to your super boring and seemingly irrelevant stats class or you might fail your midterm like I did! Woohoo!  I also learned that it takes a bit more effort to delete a class from your schedule than pressing a trash can button on the “my planner” section of my GET account. I had been enrolled in a History class at the start of my first semester, but after a single class I decided that the class wasn’t really for me so I decided to “drop” the class and add a Pan-African Studies class. This class helped me feel much more comfortable. It wasn’t until an advisement session that I realized that the history class was still on my schedule. I had to go through the hassle of getting a withdrawal slip and all the necessary signatures. These two things seem to be the major faux paus I went through my first semester.

I hope that you learned a bit of what not to do, and some odd little things to watch out for. Just try and keep your head up and work through any mistakes you may make. Things are typically not as bad as they seem, and whatever you’re worrying about is not the end of the world. You’re going to get through this.

Sincerely,

A student from the class of ‘21