Freshman year, you gain unimaginable freedom as you move out of your parents’ home into a dorm, a new environment with endless potential. You’ll have a “clean slate” to be whoever you want to be. As a freshman, you go through one of the most chaotic and growth-inducing times of your life. It’s a year for the books, with many stories to tell.
At the beginning of freshman year, your biggest challenge is adjusting to campus, dorm life, and potential homesickness. When the orientation leaders give you the tip about walking your class schedule, they mean it.
Campus can be confusing sometimes, especially classroom numbers in a building you’ve never been in before. The initial embarrassment of walking into a class late will fade as you become more familiar with campus. Beware of Bellamy, especially the ground floor, because it’s a maze down there.
Dorm life is essentially a living space with friends or random people, outside the reach of your parents. You’re responsible for feeding yourself, doing laundry, and managing all that freedom. For those of us who are only children, adjusting to having a roommate actually in the room is kind of hard.
As someone who never shared a room or bathroom, this was a lot to get used to, and it may not come easily, but it will be such a great learning and character-building experience.
As for those who have siblings, y’all have been through this before. A quick warning when doing laundry: make sure to separate reds from whites, or you’ll be wearing pink shirts, and everyone will know why. If you forget, here’s a tip: invest in a color grabber; it works like a charm.
As you become more comfortable and build a solid friend group, the endless fun begins, and the homesickness starts to fade. Establishing a friend group means you always have potential weekend plans. Your first challenge is surviving your first night out in Tallahassee. Your first party will test your limits and help you discover them.
You’ll have the best time of your life at the party, somehow make it back, and wake up in the morning not remembering what happened. Don’t worry, because there’ll most likely be tons of photos and videos of the events that transpired.
After seeing the photos, you’ll wonder the worst: Am I on Barstool? If you’re not, at least you weren’t the person passed out in a bush. You’ll have many stories to tell and always look at those photos and videos and just laugh.
Towards the end of freshman year, you start preparing for what’s next while reflecting on everything you’ve been through. There were plenty of embarrassing moments, but they were also strangely freeing. You’ve smoothed out the bumps and learned what to do and what not to do.
You may have faced emotional challenges while trying to find the right friend group, dealt with fallouts, and realized that dating at FSU isn’t as easy as it seems. You’ve navigated the going-out scene, learned your limits, and grown more confident in yourself.
Looking back, you can finally laugh at the chaos. You’ve done a lot of growing, and it’s reassuring to know you’ve set yourself up for the next three years. The first year of college is chaotic and awkward, but it also has a strange sense of freedom.
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