10 THINGS EVERY CURRENT FRESHMAN NEEDS TO HEAR

If you are a college freshman reading this right now, I truly hope your first semester of college has been everything you hoped it would be. As you wrap up and prepare for finals, I hope you can look back and be overflowing with gratitude for the new friends you met and memories you made. If you are like me, while I was extremely grateful for both of those things, I was also still feeling homesick, overwhelmed, and a little bit lonely. I had these great friends around me, but the first semester was just not what I expected it to be coming in. If I could go back and talk to that freshman year girl, I would tell her these things:

1. As hard as it is not to, don’t look at other friend groups and compare them to your own friends. It takes some people longer than others to make their lifelong friends, and that is okay and expected! Your friends will alternate your first few semesters of college, and that too is okay and expected! You will find your people, and they will be some of the ones you least expect (I’m talking to you, Cara Dale)!!

2. You are not any less smart than you were in high school just because your classes are a lot harder now than they were then. You can DO this! You are FULLY capable! Remember this as you prepare to tackle all of your first college finals. You will survive them! On that note, if you don’t do as well as you had hoped in all of your classes, that is absolutely okay. No amount of studying is worth sacrificing your mental health. All you can do is your best, and your best is enough! I promise!

3. Keep. A. Journal.!!! Write about your most fun memories and your hardest days. One day you will be thankful to have the memories to look back on and the struggles of freshman year that you will grow so much from. You will appreciate the areas of your life that have gotten so much better!

4. It’s important to find people you can be your most vulnerable self with. Despite not knowing them your whole life, your college friends will be people you can share your hidden thoughts with and find that you have more in common with the people around you than you’d ever expect! You are never alone in your thoughts and feelings, and there are people that care about you deeply.

5. It’s never too late to get involved in organizations on campus. Even if you’ve faced rejection, continue to apply to other orgs! This will truly transform your college experience and connect you to people who are different from you. You will learn from each other!

6. Say yes to trips and away games when you can. You will make some of your best college memories going on spontaneous, out of town trips with your new friends. Get started sooner than later!

7. On the flip side of #6, you do not have to do everything everyone else does to fit in. If you want to stay in when others don’t, that is 100% okay! One missed night will not make or break your college experience.

8. Make time to call your loved ones. They miss you and will appreciate hearing from you more than you know! Go home on holidays and occasional laid back weekends to see your family. It gets harder every year to find weekends where you can!

9. Do all the freshman year things while you have one more semester to do so. There is truly no experience like your freshman year of college, so soak up every minute in the dorms, eat at the cafeterias (I think about Fresh pizza entirely too often), and stay in your college town when homesickness calls you to go home. You never know what memory or new friend is right around the corner.

Before I wrap up with #10, if you find yourself not dying to come back in January like I did, have faith in the fact that your second semester will be full of so many blessings, surprises, and people that you have no idea about yet. One thing I always find is that the person I come as in August or January is never the person I leave as December or April. College is truly about growing into the people we are meant to be one day, and you are becoming that person every single day. You don’t even know the role you are playing in other’s lives just by existing! With that comes my last piece of advice for current college freshmen:

10. Remember that the Lord is intervening in your life all the time, and He goes before you without you ever knowing it! Every person you are meeting and experience you are having is for a reason. Lean on Him during the good and the bad and remember that His love for you is unconditional!

I hope each one of you reading this can come to appreciate the season you are in. I will always cherish the growth that came with my first semester of college and hope you will, too!

With love,

Chapter President, Raegan Rushing