Term papers, dorm food, roommates
– oh, my! Freshman year at college can be a scary thing. After
all, it isn’t easy leaving everything you’ve ever known to start
over in a new place populated by strangers.
Term papers, dorm food, roommates – oh, my! Freshman year at college can be a scary thing. After all, it isn’t easy leaving everything you’ve ever known to start over in a new place populated by strangers. You’ve probably heard countless horror stories about horrendous course assignments, squalid living conditions, evil roommates and malevolent professors. It’s enough to make you quiver in fear!
Relax! College doesn’t have be a torture chamber. Especially if you’re prepared for some of the challenges you will face.
To help with this task, we’ve prepared a primer to help students ease into their first year on campus. We include tips on cleanliness, adjusting to college academics, healthful eating and more.
These suggestions won’t guarantee you a successful freshman year, but they will address some of your uncertainties as your make the transition from high school to college life.
The only thing you have to fear is fear itself!
roommate relations
Moving in with a complete stranger may be one of the scarier aspects of college life, but living with a roommate doesn’t have to be a bad experience. Heather Alexander, author of “Sharing Spaces: Tips and Strategies on Being a Good College Roommate, Surviving a Bad One, and Dealing With Everything in Between,” said anxiety is normal, but the experience isn’t always a bad one.
Everyone has heard the roommate horror stories, Alexander said. “But the percentages are not true – the bad ones are the ones you hear and you usually don’t hear about the good ones. But when you’re sharing small room with someone for nine to 10 months a year, everyone rightly is going to be a little anxious.”
Alexander offers some tips on getting along:
– The first and most important method for effectively sharing a room is communication. She said new roommates need to sit down and set up ground rules in order to coexist, like agreeing not to use a blow-dryer in the early hours of the morning or to not come into the room loudly at 3 a.m. each night.
– Beyond that, Alexander said it is important to give each other time, even if you don’t hit it off at first. “The first thing is not to jump to conclusions,” she said. “In the first month there is a lot of anxiety from being away from home and being in a much more strenuous academic environment. Sometimes you take people’s attitude as being that they don’t like you, but it might be something else.”
– If coexisting is still a problem after a month, Alexander said it is then time to involve the resident assistant, who is trained in resolving roommate issues. If problems continue still, she said most schools let students move after the first month. But Alexander, who went through three roommates as a freshman, cautioned a change of address is no guarantee of better times. “Unless you have somebody picked out to move in with, you may be moving into a worse situation than what you’re leaving – you’re going into the unknown,” she said. “But, the other thing is not to suffer in silence. It is a fixable thing.”
Cleanliness
Students are often too lazy or scared to clean their dorm room, which turns into a veritable minefield of dirty laundry and empty pizza boxes. Cleaning your room is not an arduous task, and only requires several minutes of attention each day.
Joyce Bautista, a senior editor at Real Simple, a home improvement magazine, said students simply need to “contain,” or keep everything in its proper place, and “maintain” – clean with regularity. To accomplish these goals, Bautista urges students to:
– Refrain from eating at desktops, and wipe them down with disinfectant. A 2001 University of Arizona study found that desktops are one of the biggest gathering sites of bacteria, and may harbor 400 times as many germs as a toilet seat. Bautista said premoistened wipes are perfect for cleaning desktops because students don’t have to buy both paper towels and disinfectant.
– Keep dirty clothes in hampers, one for colors and another for whites. This eliminates the need to sort clothes on laundry day. Bautista recommends using collapsible hampers that don’t take up too much space when they’re not being used.
– Wash bedsheets, preferably once a week. In addition to cleaning their sheets, students should also make sure they are not dirty when they get into bed.
– Keep showers free of mildew by using after-shower sprays that don’t produce too harsh an odor.
academics
Transitioning from high school to college can often mean having to get used to large lecture halls, hundreds of students to a class and professors who lecture for an hour and a half. Getting lost in the new environment is easy to do, but important to avoid in order to begin a college career successfully.
Dr. Rob Gilbert, associate professor and orientation leader at Montclair University in New Jersey, tells his incoming students each year how to avoid some common pitfalls:
– First, he said, students should sit in the front row of classes and speak to the professor during office hours or before or after class. “Develop a personal relationship with the professor,” he said. “Some work shows, especially for freshmen, if they develop a relation with the faculty member early in the semester, they are more likely to do better in the class.”
– Studying also becomes an issue, as students generally prefer cramming the night before rather than studying each day. Gilbert said the general rule of thumb is to study two hours for every hour of class. That should include, he said, going over notes and readings before and after class each day, doing nightly homework assignments and leaving plenty of time to work on longer projects. “A student should do what the football team does,” he said. “It doesn’t wait until Friday night to pull an all-nighter for the big game. They should study a little each day.”
– Gilbert said the most important tip for freshmen is to believe in their abilities and resolve not to quit. “If you are smart enough to get into college, you’re smart enough to graduate with honors,” Gilbert said. “I can guarantee everyone is intelligent enough to graduate. I’m not sure if they are diligent enough, but they are intelligent enough.”
Managing time
Part of the allure of college lies in the scheduling possibilities – instead of sitting through class after class in one long block, students can organize their day however they like, with classes close together or far apart. But, the college system demands students manage their time wisely and effectively.
“A lot of the kids coming from high school are going to classes straight through the day, from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. – their time is very structured,” said Gerry Stenerson, assistant dean for first year programs at Bentley College in Massachusetts. “When they arrive at college, it’s a different scene altogether. They have all this unstructured time they have to deal with.”
Stenerson said studies show students who manage time efficiently tend to be the most successful students. Here are his suggestions:
– The first step toward success is developing a daily schedule for classes, as well as the free time between them. “(Students) have to accept the fact that they have this free time,” Stenerson said. “They have to commit to taking advantage of that time and putting it to good use. Instead of going back to their dorm room between classes, maybe instead stay and go to the library and study for an hour.”
– Academics shouldn’t be students’ only focus, Stenerson cautioned. “Part of college life is the social experience and learning who you are,” Stenerson said. “Clubs and organizations become a big part of a student’s life and they fill a need to have a certain time for socialization. And by joining clubs and organizations, it gives structure to the day as well.”
– Stenerson said students also should plan for exercise at least three or four times a week, to stay healthy physically and to relieve stress.
– The key to fitting everything in lies in adhering to the schedule, even when more appealing activities beckon. “I try to remind students this is their job; their first priority is education,” Stenerson said, “They’re paying tuition and the reason they go is to learn. It has to become the first priority; college is your job for the next four years.”
Alcohol
Colleges and local governments probably can’t stop you from drinking alcohol, but they have adopted tough guidelines that may make you think twice about chugging that next beer. Students should read up on their college’s underage drinking sanctions, as well as state laws, said C.L. Lindsay, an attorney who is executive director of the Coalition for Student and Academic Rights, which tracks issues affecting students.
“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” Lindsay said. “Especially in the high school world, there is a lot of myth and lure about college policies.”
While each college and state has different drinking laws, Lindsay said all students should be aware that:
– Schools can punish them for off-campus infractions. The courts have consistently held that colleges are allowed to assert their authority beyond campus borders. If the local police cited you for underage drinking at an off-campus party, the school also can punish you under their alcohol rules.
– Charging for alcohol without a liquor license is a major offense. Voluntary donations are the only legal way to recover alcohol costs.
– Doctoring your college ID to use as a fake is a really bad idea. A lot of students think that if they use a fake college ID, rather than a phony license, they’ll avoid prosecution. This simply isn’t true. Fake ID laws are always drafted to include any kind of identification.
healthful Eating
A busy college student shouldn’t subsist solely on ramen noodles and fast food. Juggling classes, a job and other activities shouldn’t be an excuse for eating junk food. In fact, a busy student needs to eat healthy in order to tackle a full day’s work.
Eating healthy begins in the kitchen, where you should prepare some of your own food. Most dorms house kitchens where you can enjoy easy-to-prepare meals and snacks.
“The kitchen is not a scary place to be, but it’s more than a storage place of your refrigerator,” Kevin Roberts, author of “Munchies,” a cookbook geared toward young adults who are cooking novices. Roberts has visited several colleges to urge students to cook, which he said is a “cheaper, simpler and tastier” way of eating. Roberts advises students to:
– Start your day right by eating breakfast. You’ve heard this hundreds of times before: Eating breakfast starts your metabolism, which helps burn fats.
– Prepare or buy a snack that you can eat at midday. Roberts suggests eating yogurt, cottage cheese or fruit. “You can’t let yourself get that hungry where you’re looking for that Taco Bell or Carl’s Jr.,” he said.
– Use plenty of vegetables when you cook. Roberts said students should buy whatever vegetable is on sale – tomatoes, broccoli, carrots – and cook it with a piece of meat or fish.
