First Year College Students - An Educational Series
Congratulations! Three months ago you suffered through the cap and gown ceremony, complete with 10,005 photographs with each and every family member. Now you have just completed freshman orientation. If you’re like many students, however, orientation can leave you with more questions and doubts than you started with. To your (*gasp*) horror, you realize that you have committed your life to academic pursuits, and wonder how you will survive it the first year, let alone the next four (five, six, or seven).
Actually, surviving freshman year isn’t that difficult, although that first year is key. There are as many guide books to freshman survival as you have relatives, and they contradict each other with the same degree of frequency. Then too, the advice they give doesn’t seem practical when pitted against that menacing presence known as “the real world.” A lot of them sound as if they were written by your parents, or other people who couldn’t remember their freshman year without rose-colored spectacles. That’s not to say that they’re wrong. Nevertheless, all the rules, strategies, “dos” and “don’ts,” and “helpful suggestions” can be better understood and interpreted through simplification. The surviving freshman needs only to master five basic principles: Change, The System, Resource Management, Time Management, and the Danger Zone. If you understand these, everything else more or less falls in line.
Study hard, keep in touch with folks, build a support system, be smart about your time and things, and minimize the urge to flirt with disaster. You would think that this is easy enough to do. Nevertheless, many people perish academically during that first year, and a tiny fraction does so literally. Perhaps I should simplify it even further: work hard, enjoy yourself, and don’t be so #$%@! stupid.
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