I cannot believe how quickly this first semester of college has gone by! It has been good and bad at times, but I have to be honest and say that I do like college so far for the most part! I have had some successes such as getting good grades and working and doing the best I could, and I think the biggest was making friends because coming into college I was scared I wouldn’t be able to make friends who I could talk to even beyond class. But I have found that the FYE helped me a lot to make friends, and I really enjoyed our class because we all knew each other and spent two classes together so we really have become a great group of students together. I loved being able to get to know people and knowing they were in two of my classes made it better because I looked forward to seeing them. That was probably my favorite part of this semester because it was a great way to welcome us to Southern and our first semester of college!
With successes come challenges, and my biggest challenge in college so far has probably been commuting to school. Commuters have a lot of problems they face such as high gas prices, traffic, weather conditions, parking, being able to socialize on campus and more. The first couple weeks of school I joined the FTO(Future ) with my friend. We only went to a couple of the meetings, but unfortunately never got to do any of the events except for one. I think that commuting had a problem in that because some of the times the meetings or events were at, we either didn’t have classes or didn’t want to take the drive up to school. However, next semester, I think I want to try something such as joining a group again so that way I can be more social with people at Southern and make more friends! Another problem I faced with commuting is the time management. I have to make sure I get to school on time in order to be on time for class, and I also have to make time not only for driving, but for parking and walking to campus (which sometimes takes around 10 minutes depending where I park.) Also traffic is one of the more annoying parts of commuting, especially the times I got out of school which was usually around rush hour traffic time. The first couple weeks of school, I took the highway and went through Hamden to get to my house in Cheshire. However, my friend who also commutes showed me a back road way which takes only 20-25 minutes and there’s usually not a lot of traffic which is great!
Speaking of time management, I have been okay in successfully managing my time and workload with all of my courses. I found that I usually did my homework right when I got home from school on most days, but some days I put it off. I have a lot of time to do my work, but some of the time I chose to do something other than my work and put it off until late. I do have enough time to do everything, considering at the moment I do not have a job or anything that would prevent me from having less time to do stuff, but considering I’m looking for a job and need one soon, I might have to work on time management when I get a job, and be able to make time for work, school and a social life/everything I want to do. It might be a little hard but I think I will just need to try and make a schedule for everything and make sure I’m doing everything I want and need to do.
For next semester, my main goals are to, yes, do better than I did this semester, but not just academically. Of course I will want to study more than I did and work harder on homework or assignments because sometimes this semester I could have spent more time on them. This is everyone’s typical goal but I think it’s good for me because I would love to see my grades go up, especially in math which was my worst subject. I will definitely go for help when needed because sometimes I didn’t ask for it when I should have. I also want to make sure I make friends with people in my new classes, because I did this semester and I think that’s a huge part of the college experience because having people at school makes going to school better!!
