Reflections on an unexpected university experience
As graduation approaches, I – like everyone else – am reevaluating my college experience and weighing what went right against what went wrong. There are things I wish I had known coming in freshman year, and opportunities I wish I’d taken advantage of. My college journey had a very different trajectory than most people’s, and at times I pine for the normal college experience I might have had. However, I keep reminding myself of the other things that made my college experience great, and I try to be kind to myself in instances where things didn’t go exactly as I thought they would. The last couple of years have helped me better understand what’s important to me and have given me confidence in how I respond to challenges.
Like many people, I had only been on campus for six months when COVID hit. Unfortunately, I was also struggling with lingering anxiety and depression from high school that made it hard for me to join a lot of student organizations. Additionally, I was living in an extremely quiet dorm where no one left their doors open to encourage conversation (which I didn’t know would be the case ahead of time), so I didn’t meet a lot of new people outside of my classes. It was hard to make new friends in online classes during the pandemic since a lot of students didn’t turn their cameras on. I wasn’t even on campus during my sophomore year; all of my classes were online, and since one of my family members was at risk for more severe disease I decided to just stay home instead of living on campus and risking bringing the disease home. However, having distance and time to myself ended up helping me move past my depression and reduced some of my anxiety. Because I was still living with my parents and not having the stereotypical college experience, it was easy to feel discouraged and blame myself for not getting more involved while I was still on campus. However, I shifted my thought patterns to be understanding instead of condemning; I understood that I had done everything I could on campus while coping with mental health challenges and keeping my grades high.
During the pandemic I continued to take more classes, including over the summers. I really loved the subjects that I was studying, even in the online class format. I’m a very self-directed person and I appreciated being able to get the work done on my own time. My summer classes helped me add another major and three certificates to my original double major. Since I wasn’t on campus and couldn’t do any in-person jobs or internships I focused on keeping my grades up and taking as many classes as I could. I found new fields, like folklore and art history, that I had never thought to be interested in before but really enjoyed.
Luckily the world had opened up enough by my junior year that I was able to study abroad at Trinity College in Dublin like I’d originally planned. I loved living and studying in Dublin and traveling around Ireland and mainland Europe. Living abroad was a real confidence booster, especially after being forced to live at home because of the pandemic. I kept myself busy learning about Irish history and folklore both in and out of class, while meeting plenty of new people. Ireland will always have a place in my heart because of all the good memories I made there.
Coming back to campus for my last year was strange because I felt like I barely knew campus, even though I was a senior. I threw myself into student organizations for my final year, but I always felt a little out of place since most of the other students had already been in the groups since freshman year. Even though my days were busy with school and my afternoons and nights were filled with student groups, I couldn’t help missing again the college experience that I could have had. At least now I understood that the circumstances were out of my control and I was doing the best I could to adjust to the situation. That was all I could ask of myself, so that was enough.
Throughout my college years I reaffirmed how important education and learning is to me. Having time at home to fully devote to my classes made me realize how much I love learning for the sake of it. I’m always reading something, in and out of my classes, and I’m always finding things I want to learn more about. While I wish my time at college hadn’t coincided with a global pandemic, I still had a college experience.It just wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be. I still learned a lot about myself and my future goals and aspirations, even when classes were online or I was living in a different country.
There’s a lot of pressure on students to have the quintessential college experience depicted in books, movies, and TV shows, but sometimes, for one reason or another, that experience doesn’t work out. That doesn’t mean your college years are a loss. If you do the best you can with what you’ve been given and continue to focus on the things that are important to you, you can still have a great college experience and make a lot of wonderful memories. But you also need to give yourself grace and acknowledge what is out of your control. There’s an old proverb about knowing the things you can change and the things you can’t, and learning to internalize the difference between them has helped me embrace uncertainty. Ultimately, I couldn’t control the circumstances of my college experience but I could control how I reacted to them, and I am extremely proud of how I did.