The first year of college is a roller coaster of an adventure filled with new co
The first year of college is a roller coaster of an adventure filled with new connections, challenges, and self-discovery. While it’s exciting to start or try something new, that doesn’t mean there isn’t some fear and anxiety involved with it.
At this point, you may be finding that college isn’t just signing up for classes, sitting through a lecture, and knocking out an assignment in a few minutes. You have different classes at different times on different days in different buildings. On top of that, you may be juggling keeping social or family activities, a job, maintaining a household, and being a caretaker to a loved one. Or, you may feel like you’re running in multiple directions trying to keep schedules straight, finishing assignments, attending classes, and being active on campus. Whatever this part of your journey looks like, you probably feel overwhelmed at times.
This is a normal response to the roller coaster of starting college. When you can, remind yourself that this is a normal feeling that will pass. It may help to work through “The Five Whys” in the section titled “College: A Pathway to Personal and Professional Growth” for a reminder of why you are here. Reading through this section, you’ll learn more about the academic and social adjustments you may encounter during your first year of college.
Questions to Consider
- How will you adjust to college?
- What are the common college experiences you will have?
Adjustments to College Are Inevitable
College not only will expand your mind, but it may also make you a little uncomfortable, challenge your identity, and at times, make you doubt your abilities. It is hard to truly learn anything without getting messy. This is what education does: it transforms us. For that to happen, however, means that we will need to be open to the transformation and allow the changes to occur. Flexibility, transition, and change are all words that describe what you will experience. Laurie Hazard and Stephanie Carter (2018)6 use the word adjustment. Hazard and Carter (2018) believe there are six adjustment areas that first-year college students experience: academic, cultural, emotional, financial, intellectual, and social. Of course, you won’t go through these adjustments all at once or even in just the first year. Some will take time, while others may not even feel like much of a transition. Let’s look at them in brief as a way of preparing for the road ahead:
- Academic adjustment. No surprises here. You will most likely—depending on your own academic background—be faced with the increased demands of learning in college. This could mean that you need to spend more time learning to learn and using those strategies to master the material.
- Cultural adjustment. You also will most likely experience a cultural adjustment just by being in college because most campuses have their own language (syllabus, registrar, and office hours, for example) and customs. You may also experience a cultural adjustment because o