During their highschool years, students often look forward to college. Not necessarily as a step towards a career, but as an experience. Over the years, the media sells teenagers the idea of the ‘’college experience’’. They promote it through movies, tv shows and ads. It’s made out to be this amazing transcendental and essential part of life. Miss out on it, and you’ll have missed out on your youth. It’s not only media though, older relatives and peers, influenced by the media, further influence teens. They talk of their own cool college stories and how much fun it’ll be once you’re there. Is your main reason for going to college to live this experience? Then let’s see if it’s worth it.
Starting college as a Freshman is exciting; it is also unnerving. The comfort of everything I know is going to disappear and it will be time to grow up and face reality. However, reality isn’t doomed to be negative if I prepare for my future and
Seniors have a tendency of taking their last year of high school for granted. They do not realize that the relaxed classes and fun filled weekends with their best friends will all soon come to a devastating end. They have applied for college, bought miniature refrigerators, and sent in their housing applications, but none of them have really thought about college in the way that they should. When asked about college most high school seniors image the huge parties, attractive people, and freedom; however, college is much more than that and, in a way, much less. College and high school are completely different when it comes to a student’s actual lifestyle, but they have many of the same traits that most high school seniors do not see coming.
To many high school students, college seems like a far away land, a mysterious place where everyone wants to be yet not many know how to get there. As children, our parents tell us how much time we have to think about college, and that it is too far down the line to think about. The truth is it is never too early to think about your future. I, like many people, put little thought into my future career and now am lost in an unfortunate mix of indecision and anxiety. Not knowing where you want to be in the future is a hard burden to bear. Many of us tend to find out that we only know what we do not want, not what we actually do want. Do we want to be poor? Absolutely not. Do we want a boring job? Of course we don’t. We all want our
The initial shock of the significant workload and expectations can take their toll, but good time management skills can prevent multiple late nights in a row to get assignments done on time. Kelci Lynn Lucier has worked in higher education for ten years, and has experienced students struggle to try and find the balance between extracurricular activities, personal activities, and education priorities. Luckily, Lucier has four tips to help best use the time provided in a day. Lucier’s first step focuses on managing ones academic time and how it needs to be the top priority above all other curricular activities, stating: “It's important to remind yourself why you're in college in the first place: to graduate” (Lucier). Lucier’s second step is be able to manage personal time, she talks about how unrealistic it is to always be working, studying, or learning, she wants students to try and find time to do something fun with friends or a club. Lucier’s third step is to wkeep the students health in mind, it does no good to stay up until two in the morning studying over a history mid-term, only to be half asleep for the test anyway; sleep is important and without can only increase the stress. Lucier’s fourth and final step is to not be afraid to seek help with your time management, she states: “The most important thing to have for time
The transition from high school to college is a dynamic time in one’s life that parallels the change from childhood to adulthood. Both of these changes are dramatic and, as a result, feelings are difficult to put down into words. A messy combination of emotions fills the heart, surfacing in strange ways. Confident high school seniors go right back to the bottom of the chain when entering college as freshmen. These students start all over, just like entering grade school or high school for the first time. The move up from high school to college signals the switch from dependence to self-sufficiency. From a personal point of view, going through the experience of graduating high school and transferring to a residential college campus at STLCOP, made me realize I was no longer a kid and capable of making my own decisions.
College is a chance to be free and is a bridge between the real world and school. I’m an adult and expected to behave as such; I make my own choices where I have to decide what is important to me. I have an opportunity to learn how the world works, to explore the limitless possibilities and a chance to admire how vast knowledge can be. College will change my life in the way that I can develop life skills outside academics, to be fully
The transition from high school to college is not only an exciting and challenging time, but also a great milestone in one’s life. There are several differences between the lives of high school and college students. Some individuals will be able to jump right in and adjust to this change seamlessly, while others may take years to adapt, or never even grab hold of the whole college experience at all. High school and College are both educational grounds for a student to grow and enrich their lives with knowledge. Both are like puzzle pieces: on one side they fit together, but on the other side they are something completely
I’ve just entered my senior year of high school. I know that this is a very important year. I have a lot of decisions to make and not much time to make them. These decisions will either make or break my life, and I want to make sure that I make them to the best of my ability because there is no turning back. I need to make sure I definitely want to attend college. The decision is totally up to me. There are many positives and negatives of attending college. Go over them, and then decide. I know myself better then anyone else, and I won’t let anyone else tell me what to do. I will make sure if I am going to attend college that I have something in mind that I will want to do, to succeed in. Choosing a major can be a
For many, after graduating high school the next big step is college. I never asked myself why or if I even wanted to. Yet, since I was not yet ready to join the work force, and didn’t want to disappoint my parents, I simply followed the path that I was supposed to take. For a while I had no direction, but through the loss of my high school English teacher and my dream of making my family proud, I discovered that college was the place I wanted and needed to be.
How I manage time is a reflection of what I value. Managing my time corresponds to how successful I will be in college and throughout life. Knowing and setting priorities to meet goals, carrying out plans, taking control of time, and staying focused are some events that are involved with time management. For many of us, balancing school with work and family is the greatest challenge involved with prioritizing. Good advance planning will help in meeting these challenges. Staying focused is usually difficult, especially for first-year students. Staying focused entails remembering and dedicating to the most important purpose for being in college. Sacrificing unnecessary commitments and keeping my
There are a vast majority of problems that students may encounter when transitioning from high school to college. For starters, college is extremely fast paced. Because students do not attend the same class every day, professors will expect you to be able to work at a much faster pace in order learn all the topics that need to be taught for the class. In order to get all the key points across, there are many weekly readings that professors assign to their students. While many students coming in to college may already be used to reading outside of the classroom, the amount of reading and the difficulty of
As I graduated high school, I thought college would just be yet another four years of high school, and I was wrong. College opens many new doors in a young man or woman’s life. There are new responsibilities and pressures that you will have to deal with, and with more freedom these responsibilities and pressures can be difficult to handle. College has changed a great deal over the years and these changes, such as more freedoms, make college a much more challenging experience. You need to start preparing for college now by making yourself more responsible and having more self-control. Although you think college is merely partying with easy classes on the side, I have experienced pressures and work loads that make the experience challenging
Throughout my lifetime I have listened to people reflect back on their college experiences and explain how college is supposed to be “the best experience of your life.” The summer after my senior year I use to try and imagine what my first semester was going to be like based on what I had heard people talk about in the past. After my first semester at NC State I realized that I couldn’t fully understand what college was like until I experienced it for myself. My first couple of weeks at Ohio State was rough and really tested my strength (mental and physical). I faced challenges and obstacles that I had never heard about in those past college experience conversations. All of a sudden there was no one to get me out of
We have a routine every time we go grocery shopping. First, my siblings dash to the van to search for spare coins. Second, I check my mother’s checking account to see how much we can use to spend. Third – if it’s under $100, I transfer money from my mother’s nearly depleted savings account. If it’s over $100, I pray a silent prayer of gratefulness.