After being an active blog reader, now I feel it timely to start my own as an effort to help my students explore themselves. Self-exploration can be an exciting, energizing and helpful process, but it can also be painful, ugly, and difficult. If it's done right, self-exploration helps you to have ah-ha moments that move you closer to the vision you have your life. My hope is that my student's blogs will help them to those ah-ha moments that will make their college experience and the rest of their life more meaningful.
As I look back to the point in my life when I started college, I laugh at the naivete that I had about how things would go (what would go wrong and what would go right). I thoroughly enjoyed my first semester. It was the era of National Championship Colorado Buffalo football and I remember it being a first priority in the first few weeks to get my dirt cheap season tickets in order to stand up all game squashed between my best friend and hopefully some new friends cheering for our football team. I remember a deep-seated desire to be a part of the large organism that was that campus and hopefully find a niche that didn't make me feel so lost or isolated.
I clung to my best friend and, I regret now, spent a lot of weekends driving home which was only twenty minutes away. Those acquaintances I went back to see were my past and not my future, but I was petrified of venturing into my new future. I envy those who were on my residence hall who spent so much time together by necessity that they developed some long-lasting relationships. I watched some new acquaintances in an adjacent hall as they made the classic freshman mistake of hanging out together all the time, drinking almost every night, and not remembering most of their first semester. They disappeared the next semester into the library because all of them were on academic probation. Smart men, all of them, but they didn't take seriously what their responsibility was to their education or that no one would prompt them.
Academically, I only had one class that was not 500 people. It was easy to be anonymous and independent. I was a self-starter academically and came to college better prepared than I feel like a lot of our current students are. When I think about why, I think it's because I had teachers in high school who were focused on teaching on those skills. Still, I had to spend inordinate amount of time studying and stressed about fitting in. I remember emerging from my freshman year a different person.
Since then, there has been graduate school, professional development, and lots of personal development. That will have to wait for another day.
What are your thoughts about what college will be like as you start?
