Transitions

Shavonna Hinton

The adjustment from high school to college is certainly not a smooth process but it is one that every incoming freshman must face.  While I’ve only nailed down one semester of college so far, I’ve come to believe that it’s in this first semester that you establish your college lifestyle.  The habits you pick up in the first four months as a newly christened college student can very well determine your successes and failures throughout your college career.

Obviously homework is a much different ball game in college compared to high school.  There’s no such thing as “busy work” in college.  It may be a broad generalization but most professors don’t give out fluff or filler assignments for the fun of it. And while the amount of homework may significantly decrease compared to that of a typical high school AP or IB student, it’s not to say that that small amount won’t take twice as long to complete.

 I learned this all too quickly when I found myself awake at 3 AM on a Thursday night barely staying awake through an hour long Frontline documentary about the stock market.  Even though I had been given my MacroEconomics assignment earlier that week, I had just assumed the work was going to be pretty basic and would take no more than a half an hour to complete.  I mean, there were only 5 questions and in glancing over them they seemed pretty basic.  But there I was that Thursday night, with just 6 hours to go before my problem set was due.  It was torture trying to keep my eyeballs open after realizing the answer to question one could only be found through watching this absurdly boring documentary. Lesson learned.

Needless to say from that point forward I made sure to read through my homework much more carefully before causally brushing it off to do later.  Now, I’m no master at homework, I sometimes still procrastinate just like everyone else but if any lessons can be taken from this it’s that in college there are no rules.  Anything goes.  Professors could very well make you watch a movie for a homework assignment and ask you to write a ten page paper on a five minute scene from it.  In hindsight it seems pretty obvious but when you’re in that moment of truth, deciding to be proactive or not, you don’t really think about the repercussions.  It’s the same for anything you do in college, not just homework. No one’s there to tell you what to do, no one’s going to stop you either.  It’s a simple concept, but it seems like in college, everyone always forgets to actually apply it.  So, just make sure you think things out and consider all the costs of the decisions you make.

Until next time-