…Freshman year is hard.
I knew college was going to be a whole different life from anything I’ve ever experienced, but I didn’t think it was going to be THIS tough.
I believe that during high school, I struggled a bit with anxiety and would panic at times when things didn’t turn out how I had hoped. With the higher levels of freedom and control that comes along with college, I assumed that I would be better able to cope with my anxiety given that I had much more time to get things done and my life was entirely within my own hands. I was wrong.
I can’t tell you how many hours I spent laying on my bed staring at the wall or the ceiling of this 3rd floor Wigglesworth dorm room paralyzed by the fear that I wasn’t smart enough to understand the latest pset or worrying about how I couldn’t come up with a good enough argumentative thesis to carry my Expos paper out of the 5-paragraph format I’ve grown up with. I can’t tell you how many times I ran over to Canaday or Stoughton and knocked on the doors of my dorm crew friends to cry about how I overloaded myself with extracurriculars and that midterms were only a couple of days away and I couldn’t pass the practice exams to save my life. I was running to these dorms because I couldn’t connect with my own roommates on these issues, roommates who I expected to be the closest to on campus but ended up feeling the most distant from. I can’t tell you how many times I didn’t have the motivation to plan out my week in outfits, a ritual I reserve for Sunday nights and one that I never pass on. When my closet wasn’t properly arranged, that’s when you knew there was something wrong with me.
I can confidently say that my high school education didn’t prepare me for the wave of work that hit me upon starting my freshman year of college. With that being said, I made sure to choose the “lowest” levels of every class I needed to take: LPSA instead of LS1A, Math MA instead of Math 1A. Even taking these precautionary measures did nothing to lessen the weight of my workload (and piling on a bunch of extracurriculars didn’t help, but typical Harvard student here), so much respect to those who chose Hum10 over Expos and CS50 to join the cult because I certainly couldn’t handle that.
During high school, I was that person who insisted on the fact that when I moved far away from home, I would never get home sick. I was that person that set her sights on the opposite end of the country and never second guessed her decision to pack away her life into 3 suitcases, hop on a plane and leave her roots behind. I was also that person on the first night in her new home who called her best friend at 8pm, crying to her about how she wanted to go back home already. Yep, that was me. I admit it.
The rest of Dorm Crew week and Opening Days was filled with highs and lows: I was excited about meeting 5 quintillion new people and trying to remember everyone’s name, hometown, and possible concentration but I was also sad that I wasn’t really connecting with people on a personal level. I was angry at the lack of authentic Tex-Mex cuisine in Harvard Square (I don’t fall into the category of Felipe’s lovers) but I was also ecstatic that our dorm room aesthetic was seriously on point. And as the weeks went on, I began to feel more and more empty inside. Cue the long hours of confusion and hopelessness, cue the barrage of emails advertising events that conflicted with my schedule (FOMO is real), and cue the pain of forgetting to pack a “winter” coat (whatever that is, am I right Texas?). It was barely the middle of freshman fall, but I seriously began to second guess my ambitious decision to move to Antarctica and leave behind all that I’ve ever known.
What’s worse was the three weeks in October when I literally felt like I was dying. Coming from such a warm/mild climate, I never experienced such dramatic fluctuations in temperature so frequently and so quickly. I simply wasn’t prepared for a New England fall and it caught up to me when I found myself hacking up a storm as I tried to give my family (who miraculously flew out here for Freshman Parents Weekend) a tour of Boston or when I was THAT person in the Math MA midterm who couldn’t stop coughing for a whole ten minutes and the TF in charge had to go buy me a hot tea to shut me up. I wasn’t only curled into a ball in that science center chair because my chest hurt so much from the forceful coughing; I was crawled into a ball in that science center chair because I tried hiding the tears and the shame that so blatantly read across my face during that midterm. It should’ve been clear to me when I had to have my roommate stay with me in my single one night to make sure I was alive the next morning that I needed to suck it up and walk across Mass Ave to get help at HUHS. Real help. But I pulled a classic stubborn student move and told myself I was just fine, that I wasn’t going to give in to a little cold. I wasn’t going to let an illness ruin my grades.
I look back on those awful three weeks and I’m shocked at the way I took care of myself through the first sickness where I didn’t have my mom to take me to the clinic or my grandma to make me swallow a spoonful of lemon and honey every hour. I knew I was stubborn, but I didn’t think I’d put my own life on the line for school work. I’m clearly not a good premed by these circumstances; maybe I’m just another hard headed Latina.
This just goes to show that taking care of yourself is a big lesson that every college student needs to learn as quickly as possible. We tend to believe that no one else understands what we’re going through and so we keep all of our fears bottled inside and let them slowly destroy us. The saddest part is that we don’t realize what’s wrong until its much too late, such as in my case where I didn’t admit that there was a problem with how I chose to be living until I almost couldn’t live anymore.
Everyone tells you that college will be the best four years of your life. Some may even tell you that freshman year is the greatest because you’re immersed into a whole new environment with so many amazing opportunities at your fingertips and with limited time commitments, you can choose to make your first year as EASY as possible. What people don’t tell you is how you will do everything you can to take on a light course load and still feel overworked and under rested, that moving very far away from home is not always easy to adjust to, and that in a sea of new faces, you will still more than likely feel utterly alone.
It’s now the end of my first semester at college. Reading period is upon us and finals will start rolling by, flights will soon be taken and home will be waiting with a warm embrace for the winter break. So far, college is not at all what I anticipated it to be. The truth is, I didn’t have enough fun and had too many headaches, didn’t eat enough meals and spent too much time slaving over homework. I’m sure it will be hard to want to come back in January, but I know that I will. I’ll hop on that returning flight and brace myself for the freshman spring. After going through 4 months of dread, I’m determined to come back with a positive outlook and a refreshed mind to carry me through the spring. If the entirety of freshman year doesn’t turn out to be the greatest year of my life, it’ll be okay because at least I can say that I tried my best in the end to make it work.
The truth is, all we can ever do is try.