My First Year of College

Hey y’all! Just wanted to reflect on my first year of college on here. For starters, I go to the University of Houston. I decided to stay home and go to UH mostly because it was the university that offered the most money. Although I didn’t get to experience what it feels like to live alone, I learned other things that are now important to me. Some examples of what I learned is how to drive literally everywhere in a span of one month. I learned many home improvements skills. I learned how to earn my own money. I learned to express how I feel and to stop hiding it. I learned to have relationships with my family that I never had before. But I also learned other things like what it feels like to cry over a class. I learned that college is STUPID DUMB HARD and what it feels like to see a “C” on an assignment you had tried your best on. For my first semester, my advisor suggested to take on 15 hours of classes and I agreed because it couldn’t be that hard, right? Well I soon learned that time management was not my forte at this time. I tried to fit 30 hours of my work schedule into my 15 hour school schedule and I felt as if I was burning out. In high school I was in band 24/7 and still managed to balance out my school work, but for some reason it was harder to do that this time around. I stepped back and realized that I had too much on my plate and decided to knock down hours from both of my schedules. Now my school schedule is 14 hours and I work 25 hours, and I saw a drastic improvement on both schedules. While stress did show up at times, it wasn’t as constant as before. My grades improved as well. My first semester I ended it with mostly B’s and 2 A’s, but this semester I got to finish with all A’s. While I started to think that this semester was a breeze compared to my fall semester, Covid 19 had decided to join in and flip that around for me. Since I didn’t have face-to-face instruction like I was use to, I had to double the work that was assigned to me in order for me to actually understand it. It took many hours of replaying lectures and rereading chapters in order to grasp the concepts of each of my classes. At the same time, I had all the time of the world because I was laid off for about a month from my job because of the pandemic, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t difficult to keep up with these classes. But for my first year, I learned a lot and I will be taking this knowledge and applying it to my sophomore year.

Go Coogs