College is an exciting and memorable time in your life. These are deeply formative years, and most likely, you will remember them more vividly than you do many that follow. In these first years away from home in a new environment, you’ll learn a great deal about yourself, make friendships that could last a lifetime, and embark on your career.
However, these can also be tough years, and all this focus on what is so wonderful about them can obscure the difficulties and make it hard to admit when you’re struggling. If your parents keep telling you about what an amazing time they had in college, it can be tough to tell them that you are having a rough time. However, when your family and others tell you how much they loved college, they don’t mean there were never any hardships. It’s normal to face some tough challenges in these years and particularly in your freshman year. Knowing this ahead of time can help you prepare and cope with those challenges.
Health
Looking after your physical and mental health in college is important, but this is often easier said than done. It can be difficult to prioritize your physical health when you’re young and feel like you can recover quickly from sleepless nights, subpar eating, and too little exercise, but these things can have a cumulative effect. If you start to feel run-down and exhausted, you may want to visit campus health services. Even if you take care of yourself physically, there’s still your emotional health to consider.
Stress is not always a negative thing, and we need a certain amount of stress in order to push ourselves. However, there is a point where good stress tips over into bad stress, and you may be especially vulnerable to feeling this your first year in college. Your school may have counselors you can talk to. Even better, it may offer telehealth services that you can access for physical or mental issues. This can make accessing healthcare much more convenient. You can also review a guide on college depression and tips for dealing with it. Referring back to this during the school year may help you.
Money
Figuring out how to pay for school and managing your money can be stressful. You might be worried about the student loans you are accumulating and how you will pay them back. Maybe you’ve had to pick up a part-time job, and you are struggling with how to balance your job and your classes. Perhaps your loan checks aren’t lasting as long as they need to.
You might just need to learn more about budgeting and managing money, and there are websites and apps that can help you with that. However, you may need more money. Don’t use credit cards and fall into a debt hole you can’t get out of. Your school’s financial aid office may be able to help you identify other sources of funding.
Relationships
Relationships can be the best and worst thing about college. This includes relationships with friends, a partner, roommates, and your professors. Because this is a time of so much change, you might find yourself growing apart from the friends you initially made. Romantic relationships can be tough to navigate, especially if you were seeing someone before you left for college and you are now in different places.
There can be a conflict with roommates whether they are old friends or strangers, and you might need to learn some new conflict resolution skills to navigate your living situation. As for your professors, keep in mind that they want you to succeed. If you are struggling in one of their classes, you can talk to them during their office hours, but be sure to demonstrate that you are taking responsibility and that you are willing to work hard to succeed.
Academics
If you have always been good in school with little effort, your first year of college could ironically be harder for you than for students who had to develop good study and time management skills in high school. Your more laid-back approach in high school may not serve you well in a more demanding educational environment. On top of that, you may be trying to take too many difficult classes, or you might find that you are having a hard time balancing a busy social life with school and work.
The pressure is likely to be even more intense if you have a scholarship that requires you to maintain a certain grade point average. Your campus may have workshops or other resources to teach you study skills and time management. Another potential source of stress is worrying about your major. You don’t have to figure this out in your freshman year, but it can help if you have some idea of what you want to study because it could affect the electives you choose even this early on. Visiting your campus career center may help you start to narrow down your choices.
Going Home
After you’ve been out on your own, going home for holidays and summer vacation can introduce a whole new type of stress even if you struggled with homesickness during the school year. Going back to live with your family and having to follow a curfew and do what your parents say can be tough. Ideally, you might be able to work out some kind of compromise with them that allows you some autonomy but remember that you will need to take on more responsibility as well.
For example, your parents may expect in return that you will do some tasks for yourself, such as laundry, and that you will pitch into household chores more, such as cooking a meal once or twice a week. Compromise is not possible in every situation, and you may need to weigh the stress of living back at home during the summer against the money that you would save if you did not move back. Another source of stress can be old friends. It can be difficult to pick up your friendships where you left off and fit back into your old life after you have been away.
