Starting college is a very critical period in life, not just in the academic sense but in other aspects of your life. It’s like when you were younger and you lost your mom at the grocery story. Only you were lost for four years.
You’re faced with many life-changing decisions, you’re becoming more independent and you’re automatically faced with taking responsibility for your words and actions. This indeed is the true definition of pressure.
And on top of all that, you have to adapt to the difficult academic challenges that are ahead of you, mind you, they won’t be easy at all. Maybe you just need help with your homework. Or you need assignment help from professors or fellow students. Maybe you can’t stay motivated long enough to study.
In reality, these are all legitimate issues and because we know that reality can hit quite hard, we’ve decided to impair advice from first hand. Keep on reading to find out how you can avoid failing your first year, as well as thrive and become the best college students you can be.
Don’t Underestimate the Difficulty
While you might have had perfect grades in high school, college is a completely different dimension. Never underestimate the difficulty of academic studies. You’re going to be faced with a lot of unknown, so it’s essential to accept the fact that you’re not going to know it all or understand it for that matter. If you need help, don’t be afraid to say out loud,I need someone to help me with my math. Not only are you going to take the pressure of yourself, and minimize the feeling of guilt once you fail something, you’re going to get on the right path, and that is finding knowledge and slowly packing your brain with essential information you’re going to need for survival of your first year.
Find Your Ideal Place to Study
Because it’s so easy to get distracted in your first year, everything’s a novelty, and you want to try yourself out at everything, it’s easy to forget you need to study. One of the most important factors that influence how well you will do on your tests and in your everyday obligations is how much you study. And you can’t study if you’re distracted constantly.
Find an ideal place where you can be devoid of all distractions, and where your focus will be only on studying. It can be the college library, your dorm, a quiet nook at home where nobody will bother you. It all depends on what kind of a person you are. Some study better with a TV turned on, or while listening to their favorite artist, while other’s need complete silence.
Figure out where you have the least distractions and make it your study oasis.
Take Advantage of Resources
If your college offers tutoring services or labs where you can work additionally on the courses and topics that you’re having trouble with, take advantage of it.College is all about researching and finding different resources that can help you with your essays, assignments, motivation, research, studying etc. This could be a study group that gets together on Thursdays and goes through difficult assignments together, or it might be additional classes with your professor. Don’t avoid them, attend each and every one of them.
Connect With Your Fellow Classmates
Focus on your studies, but don’t forget to take some time to meet the people in your classes. Not only are you going to let some steam off by socializing and interacting with other people, you’re going to make connections that can be crucial on certain occasions. For example, you might miss a few classes here and there. Who will you turn to? The professors usually can’t give you notes, that’s why you need to create and maintain a network of people who are going to be there to help you when you miss out.
Organize and Prioritize
It’s important to strategically approach the first year of college. Organize your life, top to bottom. Make sure to be clear about what your priorities are. What are your long-term goals? What will it take to achieve them?
One of the basic skills you are going to have to acquire is organizing yourself and your life. Give yourself objectives and deadlines and be very firm about them. Don’t procrastinate and live off of excuses. The better you are organized, the more efficient your studying will be, because you won’t let distractions get in the way of your organizations.
Balance Life Out
To survive your first year in college, not only do you have to strive to thrive, but also enjoy being a social butterfly. Find the perfect balance between doing your academic obligations on time, as well as engaging in social interaction. Don’t go too far with either of these, but the truth is, they are both necessary and should be equally tended to.
Attend Classes – Regularly
You might have heard this one before, so frequently, that you just want to put your headphones on and ignore that advice. But besides being obvious, it’s also very crucial. You’re essentially attending classes for your own good.
It might be tempting to skip a few of your morning classes, or skip a class in the middle of the day to go for a cup of coffee, but don’t do it. Not only are you going to miss collecting notes, but you’ll probably miss out on hearing valuable information about the course itself. Professors like to give you little hints about what’s the most important thing to learn, what you need to focus more on while studying for the exam etc.
Remember, push yourself, study hard, create a healthy balance of studying and socializing, because nobody else is going to do it for you. Independence in your college years can be a wonderful life period, as long as you start off right. The struggle of the first year will prepare you for the next and all the fear and incapability you might have felt during the first year in college, are going to turn into your strengths.