What I wish I knew freshman year

No one explanation, summary, advice column, or Reddit rant really captures what freshman year is like. No experience is comparable to your own, and the only thing anyone can count on is that freshman year will be transformative. Here are a few lessons for incoming freshman that I had to learn the hard way.

How to love being alone 

College is always advertised as a social experience, from roommates to classmates to friends you meet at parties, and, as a consequence, people forget to mention how lonely it can feel, especially at first. The first few weeks of freshman year are an illusion: friends from orientation week are always available to hang out, and everything is new and exciting! A couple months into the first semester, however, the pressure of classes starts to set in, and it becomes harder to see people. Schedules become busier, and calendars fill up. 

One of the most profound skills I had to hone was reinvesting in my hobbies and myself after so much change, and learning how to love and even relish the time I spent on my own. I had to learn how to be alone without feeling lonely and that, even if I didn’t go out with friends every single day or spent a few nights in, I still had a huge community of people that would be there for me at the drop of a hat. I started going on walks, making new playlists, finding new video games, calling my friends at home and taking advantage of the time I had away from my friends in college. Learning how to love my solitude, cherishing the time I spent away from the hustle and bustle of school and finding an active social life gave balance to busier weeks when I didn’t have the energy or time to see my friends; I had my routine to look forward to after a long day. 

Overcoming the choice paralysis  

The first week at Hopkins is akin to being torn in 100 different directions — every extracurricular organization, research opportunity and volunteering position seem to be vying for your attention. Everything is interesting and poses a new opportunity for friends or resumes or to invest time into something you love, and it’s almost overwhelming. Trying everything is almost impossible once classes start, and it’s so hard to pick what to try. 

Most of the advice I got at the start of the year was to try everything I was interested in and narrow it down from there, but that doesn’t really work anymore. Most clubs have a time commitment or an application, and filling out that many forms or attending that many meetings is a huge time investment. Going into freshman year, I wish I’d known that, as much as it’s good to try a myriad of activities, you don’t have to try everything that interests you. It’s okay to be picky, to decide against an opportunity because it’s too much of a time commitment. It’s okay to take your time, to not get involved in everything at once and to figure out how much you can handle before joining any clubs at all.

Trusting your gut

You can ask for advice from every upperclassman you know, but, in the end, the only person that makes the decisions about how to spend your time freshman year is you. Everyone was eager to provide advice and opinions on what the “ideal” freshman year was, how I should handle the situations I came across, whether or not I was handling them well and what more I could’ve done. But the biggest lesson I had to learn this past year was to trust my instincts and my abilities, and to learn that, no matter what other people at Hopkins were doing with their time, I was doing what was best for me. 

I had to learn to trust my own judgment and decide who influenced it. Even when other people’s decisions or actions challenged whether I was “doing freshman year right,” I had to keep my trust in myself strong. And that’s true for every freshman; whatever choices you make, responsible or irresponsible, are the right choices for you because they lead you to new experiences or new lessons. The friends you choose to make, the opportunities you decide to pursue, the people you spend your time with will always be correct in the moment. If there’s one message I really wish someone would’ve told me before I started college, it’s that whatever path I picked was the right path. If there’s one thing for freshmen to take away from this article, it’s that your judgment is sound, and you’re doing the right things even if other people choose to approach this year differently.

Shreya Tiwari is a sophomore from Austin, Texas majoring in Biomedical Engineering. She is the Science and Technology Editor for The News-Letter.