This past semester has marked the end of my second year. It’s strange to say that I am technically halfway through my degree, and yet, it feels as if I’ve only just entered university. I look back on my high school years sometimes, and categorize them by whether they were good or bad — grade nine was an adjustment year, so it being bad doesn’t count; grade ten was bad; grade eleven was good before the pandemic; grade twelve was surprisingly good — and I wonder how I will rank my years at university as well. I have found, however, that this isn’t possible. Even for my high school years, I cannot paint 365 days with the same broad strokes.
I think I entered university with the expectation that everything was going to go swimmingly for me. I was going to attend all my classes, make tons of new friends, do all my readings, get amazing grades, and be the best possible version of myself, all without breaking a sweat. I remember saying once that I had sacrificed my entire social life for academics in high school, which is something I promised I would not do in first year.
In reality, a change of scenery did not change the fact that I was horribly socially awkward, which made making friends only slightly difficult. I stuck by my friends from high school and isolated myself to do schoolwork once again. Couple that with the fact that most of my classes were online, and it made a perfect recipe for my anti-social tendencies. It wasn’t like my academics were easy either — I learned quickly of the torture that is getting up for an 8:30 class as a night owl, and had difficulties adjusting to the university student lifestyle. Although I could categorize my first year as good since I did well in my classes, my mental health and social life were terrible. I was severely burnt out and isolated by the end of my second semester’s exam season and I spent most of my time wishing I could stay home in bed all day.
My second year has been light-years better in this regard. I vowed not to become as self-destructive as I was in my first year and hyped myself into joining extracurricular activities. I’ve made more close friends in my second year than I think I had throughout my entire high school career. It may seem as if I flipped a switch in myself, but I don’t think that is the case — as stated, most of my classes in first year were online, and I was in a new environment that scared me. I’m glad that I’ve adjusted and was able to develop a balance between school and my well-being. I can see the effects of that now; although university is always going to be a source of extreme stress for me, and going into exam season is always going to be terrifying, I feel leagues better than I did this time last year, which I can attribute to my support system, a lot larger than it was before.
I know I said that it wasn’t possible to do so, but if I were to rank my first two years of university, I would say that my first year was an adjustment year, so it being bad doesn’t count. My second year, however, was good.