Is the first semester of college difficult? Easy?
After moving in, I settled into my dorm with my roommate easily, whom I found through the roommate matching system that my school had. I had the feeling telling myself: “okay, this first semester shouldn’t be so bad. I think I can manage it on my own.” Instead, how about we scrap that and set it over to the side, and completely forget about it? Going through it, I never would have thought the phrase “midterm season” would humble me after graduating from a public high school.
I believed that overcoming your first semester is going to be an experience, because everything is a different experience compared to what I had experienced in high school. I only had remembered my tests in high school were not all that difficult, but here at college, you’re taking the time to study materials for it in a couple of days in advance, or even weeks for people that liked to prepare. Clearly, I just had to experience it myself in order to know what it’ll be like in the next seven semesters of college that I have left.
College can be difficult depending on your major. I’ve discovered that us STEM majors, were just at a disadvantage and since our classes were difficult compared to the business majors at my school, as well as the journalism, advertising, and art majors too. We were prone to having a lower GPA than the rest, but it meant that we just had to work harder to keep up with the professor. Especially for myself, I’m a double-major at my school, thinking of adding another major and a guaranteed minor in Cognitive Science.
Even mentally, I felt burnt out from the work I had since the workload was different compared to what I had at my high school, except for my mathematics and computer science classes, which both had quite a load of work to do. There were so many things I had to focus on: academics, social life, alone time, finances, and pretty much everything that you’d need to live, especially being out on your own in your first semester. There’s just so much on your plate, but knowing that in the end, time management is the key skill that everyone should learn to get good at so that way, you’ll be fine and that you’ll be able to sleep at latest 1 in the morning for your 9 AM class.
Coming into college, my time management and sleep were all over the place, I was sleeping at ungodly times, maybe around 3 AM and had a 9 AM class, which does not do any justice for my wellbeing. Fortunately, I was able to fix it so that I would be sleeping at 1 AM and wake up at 8 AM for my 9 AM class. In the end, it’s really how you plan your day throughout the weeks so that you can manage your sleep and be able to give yourself a rest, which was what I found out after being here for a semester.
