Lessons from my first-year

One of the best (and worst) things about going away to college is the independence that comes with it. Gone are the days of curfews and having to spend your weekends doing chores, but also gone are the days of home-cooked meals and having someone willing to do your laundry and dishes for you. Independence— it’s something anyone who’s spent any significant amount of time on a college campus realizes makes people do stupid things, but it’s a necessary part of life. It’s also something I never fully understood the implications of until this year.

Sure, my first year of college was fun, and I did take full advantage of my newfound independence. Being across the country from all my family and friends, it’s hard not to feel like I was on my own; I can’t exactly go home just so my mom can do my laundry or walk down the street to hang out with my friends. But at the same time, it didn’t necessarily seem like I was being held responsible for my actions. Bad grade? It’s okay, I was a freshman. No summer internship? It’s okay, I was just a freshman. In every aspect of my life, it seemed like the fact that I was a freshman was a legitimate excuse for pretty much anything.

In a way, this mentality shaped my freshman year more than the fact that I was in a new place, doing new things with new people. It allowed me to go out instead of studying and not feel guilty, because it was my freshman year, and I should be having fun. It allowed me to brush off bad grades and procrastinate projects because it was my freshman year, and I was still getting the hang of college classes. The fact that so many people were coddling me, telling me “you’re at a big university now, and it’s okay if you’re no longer on top” made me shoot for being average, when that has never been something I’ve settled for in any area of my life.

Unfortunately, I didn’t notice I was using my status as a first-year as an excuse until I got back to campus this year, and realized I could no longer justify my decisions in the same way. I was a sophomore now, and I was supposed to have at least some semblance of what I was going to do with my life. I knew my way around campus, I knew how college classes worked and I knew I couldn’t get everything I wanted to done if I spent my weekends doing anything but. I am a sophomore, and I know better, but it’s hard to break a pattern that you never realized you were in. Sure, Duke is hard, I’m not going to argue against that, but preemptively making excuses for mediocrity only ensures it will happen.

I’m not saying that warning first-years about an expected drop in GPA isn’t advisable, or that being in a new situation around new people isn’t a legitimate excuse, for some things at least. I’m saying that because so many people warned me against the “hardships” of being a freshman at a prestigious university like Duke, it made excellence seem unattainable, and therefore not worth trying for. Being a walking excuse made me rely on feigning a lack of knowledge and kept me from being able to learn from my mistakes. Freshman year is a time of transition and new experiences, and that can get overwhelming, but the most important lesson I learned during my first year of college was a lesson I learned a little too late: being a freshman is not a good enough excuse for not being true to who you are.