In the lead-up to my first year at university, I sat through too many impromptu parental lectures and read enough articles that felt like they were all saying the same thing about how great university is without really saying anything at all — the valuable life lessons you’ll learn, the incredible experiences you’ll have, the unique people you’ll meet, the works. I’ll try to make this one a little different.
There’s two main lessons I got from my first year. For one, honestly, the things you’ll experience will, even just by virtue of experiencing them at the same time as others, help build some community between you and the people around you. It’s a nice thought that it’s easy to find empathy, particularly in the first year where everything is new and pretty much everyone is trying to build a stable footing as they begin university life.
The other thing is that you won’t leave this year, let alone university, the way you thought you might, nor navigate it the way you thought you would. I’m barely halfway through my degree, and the person I was in first year seems light years away from the one I am now, which will probably seem light years away from the one I’ll be when I graduate. Accepting change is one thing I promise will help you, because you’re going to be seeing a lot of it — if not by way of co-op switching things up every four months, then by way of how university tends to change everything from the people in your life to your outlook on it.
For me, the greatest change was my approach to handling school and other responsibilities, including Imprint. I started my first year doing all my readings, handing in assignments days before they were due, and balancing a couple extracurriculars on top to help beef up my resume for co-op applications. It worked well enough, until my friends (check out those community bonds!) forced me to realize that staying up till 4 a.m. just to finish the economics module I’d planned for that day probably wasn’t sustainable or even effective in terms of learning. So over the past year and a half, I’ve been working on being kinder to myself and undoing ways of thinking that are definitely more harmful than beneficial in the long run. It’s been painfully slow progress, but hey, I don’t time my breaks anymore, so there’s that!
The point is that you really don’t know what will happen, and that’s okay, ‘cause no one else does either. I genuinely thought I would be able to keep up an insanely strict study schedule, but humans are literally not built that way, and that took some serious mental work to undo. My loved ones, my studies, and even Imprint have all shown me that change will happen whether you like it or not, whether it benefits you or not, and how it affects you is really a matter of mindset. I can’t make any promise other than change is the only real constant, and learning to catch what breaks you can along the way is more worth it than you might think (wow, maybe there really is no getting around sounding like a self-help guru when you write these things). Keep all that in mind, and you’ll be alright. Rock on, Warriors!
