Recently, when people asked me how my classes were going, I would just look at them for a few seconds and say, "I completely underestimated the workload in college." Compared to last semester, my workload has become much larger. In addition, I was unable to keep up with the pace of my classes. Just today, I found out that there was an assignment due that I have no idea about.
So here I am, writing to you guys about what I realized within the period of disappointment I felt about missing the due date of an assignment for the first time: I need to become more responsible for my own education. Had I taken it into my own hands to read through every one of my syllabi carefully and write down all the important dates, I wouldn't have missed this assignment. If I wanted to graduate college with a degree in hand, then I needed to learn to manage my own time better.
It might sound cliché since everyone that we ask about college would tell us that college teaches us how to be responsible and manage time. But let's be honest here. Even if a million of people told us that we will learn to be responsible in college, we wouldn't really understand it until we experience college for ourselves. All it took for me to recognize that I was on my own is for my college teacher to hand me a syllabus without explaining it and expecting me to understand it.
But I know that I would eventually have to grow up. I also know that understanding instructions on my own is what it takes to be a responsible adult. Nevertheless, this is hard for me to accept because it only took 8 months for me to go from a high school student who depended on his teacher to a college student that had to learn the rules of the classroom on his own.
At the same time, I am excited to see how I might change within these next three and a half years. I hope to become an independent student who my teachers and peers could depend on to get everything done on time or even better, early.
I am also wondering how you guys feel about this transition, especially since I know that I am not the only one who noticed a considerable increase of difficulty between my first semester in college and my second semester. Feel free to post comments about the changes you are going through right now or how you changed if you already experienced this kind of transition in college.
~Justin Chen
"The price of greatness is responsibility." -Winston Churchill
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