To welcome you back from a winter break hopefully filled to the brim with holiday cheer and cookies, today begins with a fresh start.
It’s officially 2012 and here we are after a three week break starting a new quarter of our freshman year.
The beginning of a new quarter doesn’t seem like a big deal, but we get to start over. With new classes (that we planned for this quarter and hopefully got to enroll in, though let’s be honest, our schedule probably didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to), new professors and a new daily walking or biking routine from our residence halls to our classes, we start fresh.
We literally get to start fresh with clean notebooks and pens, which is my favorite part.
But before we start a new year and a new quarter, I thought it would be interesting to look back at last year and see how dorky we once were (and maybe still are) as college freshman in fall quarter, as well as how cool we thought we were second semester senior year.
So here it begins.
Once we were done applying to college, there was nothing to do but wait until we got those thick or flimsy acceptance or rejection letters.
And again, we thought we were cool because we were going to get into college and didn’t need to worry about our classes any longer. We sat back and turned on autopilot. Some of us maybe had even worked hard our second semester because we either wanted to keep our GPAs or because of what our teachers kept endlessly saying got to us: “Colleges still look at your second semester, and it counts.”
Fast forward to graduation: A time of tears and parties.
We graduated high school knowing where we were going to college and feeling so good about ourselves. We really did think we were the coolest people ever to walk our high school campus, especially while we were walking to receive our diplomas.
It wasn’t until we actually got to college when we discovered that we weren’t so cool after all. Being a freshman again is hard; starting over in general is hard, but we felt more lost on a new campus in a new town than we did when we walked onto our high school’s campus for the first time trying to open our stubborn lockers.
We walked onto campus not knowing anything. From where our residence halls were to where we could eat on campus, everything was a blur — literally. We didn’t know that wearing that green housing “Class of 2015” lanyard around your neck yelled “freshman” across campus (although I don’t think anyone really cares, though I could be wrong).
And let’s be real, most of us probably got lost a few times on campus in the first few weeks. We also probably used our handy campus maps and walked to the front of one building, looked up to see we were in the wrong place, then turned around to continue walking in a different direction looking quite funny to those who knew where their classes were.
We are no longer at the top of the food chain: The mighty seniors who walked throughout campus with visible pride. Instead, we are the dorky freshmen getting by our first year slowly, but surely.
With this new quarter, learn from your mistakes from last quarter. Do better than you did. Do something you wanted to do but didn’t get a chance to do. Just do something you didn’t do in general.
Freshman year is a year to experiment and find out what you want to do. We’re about to hit the halfway mark of freshman year in a couple of weeks, believe it or not, so do anything and everything and don’t worry about looking dorky while doing it.
Because when it comes down to it, we probably all will look a little bit dorky every now and then.
So start off both 2012 and winter quarter stronger than you did Fall 2011. Take advantage of this fresh start because another won’t come around for a while.