Coming into college, I was an undeclared student. I graduated high school with mediocre grades at best and I did not even know if going to college was something that I really wanted to do. In our society, there is this stigma that is placed around higher education that tells us that if we don't go to college, we won't amount to anything. I, for one have never been the best student. I somehow managed to fail at least one math class per year for the first three years of my high school career, which I later had to make up online before I could graduate. I had myself convinced that school was not for me.
You know the old saying. The one that says the definition of crazy is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Well that crazy person was me. I was making the same mistakes over and over again and I was expecting a different result. I thought that maybe college would be different and come easily to me (lol). I soon found out that this was obviously not the case. I quickly started to fall behind in all of my classes. I swore that the mistakes were in the classes that I was taking. Maybe I just wasn't taking the right classes, or maybe it was my professors.
After the end of my fall semester, I received a letter from the university saying that my GPA had dropped below good academic standing and that I had two semesters to bring it up or else I would essentially be kicked out of the university. I was shocked. I knew that things had gotten bad, but I had no idea that they had gotten
this bad. But again, I made the same mistakes and found myself in the same position at the end of the next semester. This is probably the point where you would want to slap me and tell me to get my sh*t together, and honestly I want to slap myself too! But the reality of the situation is that my grades had nothing to do with how easy or hard my classes were or how smart or dumb I was. The truth is that my freshman year of college, I was not happy.
Your freshman year of college is supposed to be the best year of your life! You're supposed to make all of these new friends and party and have the time of your life! Although I had made some amazing new friends, this was not the case for me. I was lost and depressed. I did not care about my grades and I did not want to be there. I remember one night when I was registering for classes and I just broke down. I called my mom crying and told her that I don't want to take any of these classes and I hated school. I was so close to giving up. I felt like all I was doing in college was wasting everyone's time and money, and that made me feel so guilty. I was taking the opportunity of being able to go to college for granted, and I knew it.
That summer I did a lot of "soul searching". My dad gave me a book called
Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath a while back, and I decided to open it back up to remind myself of what my strengths are. Each copy comes with an access code to an online quiz that will tell you what your top 5 strengths are, and then you can open up to those sections in the book and read more about them. This gave me something that I could relate to. It's a really comforting feeling to know that there are more people out there who are like you. I think that something that is so flawed in our education system is that we spend so much time focusing on what our weaknesses are that we forget to own our strengths.
Another thing that has helped me this semester is getting involved in organizations. Finding people who are interested in things that I am interested in has really helped me gain a sense of belonging. I don't care how much of a loner you think you are, everyone needs people. It's so important to have positive people in our lives who inspire us and lift us up.
Lastly, be open to new experiences and opportunities. Although it can be tough to make yourself get out of your dorm room, I promise you that you are going to regret staying in way more than you would regret saying yes and stepping outside of your comfort zone.
At the end of the day, we are all people. We all have insecurities and we all just get into a funk sometimes! Just remember that you are never alone. If you feel lost, things will get better if you just give them time. I obviously do not have all of the answers, but the beauty of life is that we get to make up the questions as we go, and we figure out the answers ourselves.
