The first semester of your freshman year is truly a time unlike anything else you will ever experience in your life. There are countless changes happening around you every single day, and it is absolutely valid to be afraid of what lies ahead. Just completing my very own first semester, I have found that so many experiences I had gone through in these last few months I was not alone in. In fact, so many freshmen have had these same thoughts and fears as I did, and we all survived them. So far. These are your canon events for your first semester of college, and I promise, you will get through them, too.
1. living in north
Getting a terrible pick time and being left with only North left is quite literally the canon event of freshman year at the University of Connecticut. For months ahead of move-in day, you will feel an impending sense of doom scrolling on Reddit, hearing horror story after horror story of how truly bad it is to live there. I promise, as a current North resident, it is not that bad. Yeah, compared to the Northwest bathrooms, you’re nowhere near luxury, but it could be so much worse.
In my own experience, the trick to mastering North bathrooms is through mastering the showers. North is notorious because of the showers, three curtain separated showers with one drain, built on a slight slant so that the water will run through each shower into the drain at the end. Not ideal, I know, but if you can stick to the right-most shower, sometimes even the middle, you will be fine. Also, North’s halls are so much smaller than the other freshmen dorms, meaning you are sharing a bathroom with significantly fewer people. And I promise, the size of the rooms can feel twice as big as all your friends in Northwest and Towers, so that at the end of the day, you might even feel lucky to be where you are. It is a character building, slightly humbling experience, but it’s a rite of passage for UConn students. Once you survive that, you can take on anything.
2. Friend drama
If you saw this one and took a big sigh, don’t worry, I did too. I remember being so excited to get out of high school and away from all the drama about who was cooler than who, such and such, only to find myself in something one could consider worse: college drama. It is canon that you are going to meet a group of people in those first few weeks and swear that you have made your lifelong friends. I am here to tell you these are not your lifelong friends, nine times out of ten.
It will start out great at first, but over time, you will catch red flag after red flag before that final blow is dealt and the group is left in shambles. It will feel like the end of the world in the moment, and you’ll probably feel like you will never find friends after that because it’s “too late” in the semester (it’s September), but when you look back at it in October and November, you will be grateful, and you will find better friends. It takes so much time to foster true and genuine friendships. Please don’t get frustrated when you haven’t met your bridesmaids the first week of school. And I promise, when you see your hometown friends posted up every single night with all their friends at school, you will later have a moment of clarity where you realize nobody is having as much fun as you think they are, and that everybody just wants to look like they are having a blast to mask how alone and afraid they still may feel adjusting to a whole new place.
Freshman year is scary, and these friendships will take longer than one semester to build, likely. You are not behind if you don’t have a large friend group right away; you are right where you are supposed to be.
3. Developing a strong relationship with doordash
This isn’t even a first-semester canon event, even; this is an entire college event. The dining hall will fool you for the first month, but give it another few weeks, and you will be so sick of the same low-quality foods every single day that you will meet my very close and personal friend, DoorDash, and become friends with them as well. I probably was at a steady two to three times a week dasher towards the end of my first semester, and I learned very quickly to ignore the charges in my bank account. Pro-tip: invest in DashPass (or get the free trial and cancel it on the last day) and find any inconvenience in your day as an excuse to order food because you deserve it. You always deserve it.
4. Discovering what a wind tunnel is
This is very UConn-specific because, somehow, even being from Connecticut, the wind here is like nothing I have ever experienced before in my life. It is usually late October to November when you will first learn what these wind tunnels are like, and no matter what your expectations are, it is almost always worse. In my own experiences, the McHugh area can get so strong, I have had to physically fight against the wind to walk forward. The Chemistry building is bad, too. Don’t try to navigate an umbrella if you want to keep your pride.
5. contracting a Mysterious illness
There isn’t much to even say about this one other than everybody you have ever met in your life will be sick all within the same few weeks, and nobody will have a diagnosis. This is a common phenomenon that almost every freshman in their first semester across every college experiences. The best advice I can give is to focus on taking care of yourself, washing your hands, drinking water and eating right, prioritizing getting good sleep, and letting your body rest when it is fighting something. It’s okay to have fun in college, especially in these first few months, but listen to your body and give it what it needs.
Once again, this transition period in your life is truly a unique experience and will teach you so many incredible and important lessons, and while it may get hard and overwhelming at times, remember you are not alone in whatever you are going through. There is a whole sea of people feeling the same anxieties as you are. It is just a part of the journey.