What I've Learned From College So Far (Part 1)

I started my first year of college about less than three months ago and I have learned quite a lot from my experience so far. Today's blog will be about five of the things I've learned about college. Note that everyone's experience is and will be quite different than mine, but I hope that you can relate to one or two of these at the least.

1. The friends you hung out with in high school won't always be the same friends you'll have in college.

I know a lot of us have probably experienced this already and know what I mean. But for those who aren't in college yet or just haven't experienced this then I shall explain to you all what I mean. It's pretty self-explanatory but some might still wonder why exactly this happens. Well, let me tell you all that you may or may not have the same schedule as your former friends. At the beginning of the year, me and my group of friends had planned everything out; at least we thought we did. We planned on meeting up at a certain time in the day for lunch or just to study together. It all worked out during the first two weeks of school, but as soon as most of us started to have more homework, projects, and quizzes to study for being piled up onto our plates, we all started to drift apart from our original group. Many of us started to either go straight home or to our dorms right after classes to work on our assignments or we would end up studying with students from our class instead of with each other. In the end, we all started to drift apart from each other but that doesn't necessarily we stopped being friends. We all still talk to each other every once in a while, but now it's less frequent due to our busy college lives.

2. Looking up professors' names on RateMyProfessor should be the second thing you do when choosing your classes.

You have all probably heard about the website RateMyProfessor.com, right? Well, don't use it to decide whether or not you should take that class with that specific professor; at least that's not the first thing you should do. The first thing you should really do is, if your college has a specific Facebook group with other upcoming freshman and some upperclassmen in there as well, ask the upperclassmen or any freshman that might know a bit about how your professor is like during the course you want to take. Many professors teach different subjects so you would want to ask about how and what the professor teaches in the course you're going to take first from someone who's taken that class before because RateMyProfessor might have comments about the professor but it's not specifically their experience in the course you're taking. For example, my CWL professor for literature and play also teaches a comics & graphic novels course as well. I would most likely say that my experience with the professor in that class is different than the student who's in the comics & graphic novels course. I might say that the teacher is pretty boring and always gives us reading assignments while the other student might say the class is fun and exciting because the professor makes them read excerpts from comics and graphic novels. So, ask around first before relying on RateMyProfessor.com!

3. Try to bring your own lunch.

If you dorm, you probably don't have to worry about food because your food is already paid for when you pay for your tuition and dorming fees. But if you commute to school, you probably would want to bring your own lunch instead of buying lunch at school. Many schools have microwaves that students can use to heat up their cup of noodles and homemade lunches. It is actually more cheaper to do that than to spend about $10 on a bowl at Panda Express at school. Also, some colleges offer commuter passes at the dinning halls, so if you would like to try the food at the dinning halls you can apply for the commuter program. It's a bit expensive but you're really paying about a hundred or so for a whole semester of dinning hall food. But anyways, bringing your own lunch is great too for those who are a bit picky with what they want to eat.

4. Get to school early to get a parking space.

Finding parking at a university with about half a million students attending each semester is really hard. If you have a class at 8am, you should probably be at school about two to three hours before so you could claim a parking space near your class. If anything, you could just sleep in your car until your class starts or hang out at the student union or library until then. Also, if you have a big gap between your classes, you probably just want to stay at school until then because it will be harder for you to get a parking space if you were to leave then come back. If anything, you could always carpool with a friend with a big gap or someone who's done with classes to take you somewhere during your gap and just drop you back off when you have to go back to class.

5. Don't procrastinate.

Although we all already know that we shouldn't procrastinate, we still do it. What I've learned so far is that in college, procrastination shouldn't be in anyone's vocabulary. We might think that just because we don't meet with our professors every single day like in high school or elementary, that that gives us an unlimited time to do our homework. But oh boy are we wrong. During the beginning of the semester I would always hold off my homework to the last minute only to realize how much three simple math problems take up more time than it looked. Also, the longer you hold one assignment off, the longer it will take to you finish it if you start getting more assignments from your other class. When you're assigned something, you should start it asap and if you can't finish it in one day then continue to work on it throughout the week but don't start on it then finish it last minute. For example, if you have math homework, start on it the day it's assigned and if you can't finish it in one day plan out how many problems you could do each day until it's due so you won't have so much to do on the day before it's due and you also won't have a lot to do during that week as well.

Those are five of the things I've learned so far from college. I will release a part two very soon but I hope you can relate to at least one of these. But if you are not yet in college, I hope that you can learn something from this!

#college #university #procrastination #homework