College Ahead - Mind the Gap

No parental supervision, strict curfews, house chores or daily school assignment—it’s year-round parties and one big adventure from now on, right? When you hit your 20s life seems to suddenly explode with a lot of apparently hidden abilities and opportunities. It feels like the perfect time to start building your future self and, switching from (high school) Senior to (college) Freshmen, sounds like the great way to go about it.

College presents you with the chance to experience life outside your comfort zone, discover your strengths and weaknesses and push your limits. But what if you were to filter college life through the eyes of the-more-experienced you? What would you see: ‘daydreaming’ or naïve expectations; ‘doing whatever/whenever you’d like’ or lack of commitment; ‘innocent course skipping’ or time wasted? Like so many things in life, this too is a question of perspective.

Walk the Walk and Talk the Talk or, ‘The Verified Recipe’

So, you’re settled in, you got your schedule straight and feel ready to start. That’s the right energy and you need to learn how to sustain it as you’re in for routines that you may not particularly enjoy and consistent effort for the years ahead. Be aware of the fact that college can bring lots of rewards but disappointment as well, it’s only natural.

There will be times when things fall out of place no matter how much you struggle to maintain balance. Since accumulating knowledge is the main objective here, expect periodic testing and a lot of paper writing as part of your reality. Though chances are that they be equally challenging in the beginning, generating new ideas (and expressing them in a clear and structured manner), might remain your ‘Achilles’ heel’ for a while. Despite your focus and research efforts, you could come up empty-handed: no original thoughts or approaches, no improvement in means of expression etc.

Instead of wasting precious time on a wild goose chase, you could decide in favour of a more pragmatic solution to your predicament: get a professional paper writer to assist. If you’re stuck in a particular moment and can’t overcome it on your own, there’s no shame in asking for help. And, if you want to make the best of it, turn this into a teachable moment.

Observe and analyze the new perspective or interpretation of the core topic, the rhetorical devices used to prove a specific point, the inner structure of the exposed ideas, the method used to puzzle all the arguments together, the linguistic tools and overall tone used to ensure the reader’s engagement with the text.

Start from this experience to map your own writing process and work on constantly improving it. As you will most certainly have the opportunity to see during adulthood, being able to clearly shape and communicate a variety of ideas and concepts is a valuable asset. And the same goes for your ability to collect and utilize different types of information, which is something that also needs constant training. That being said, the truth of ‘practice makes perfect’ becomes undeniably obvious.

Brave, New Times

The world we inhabit today runs in fast-forward, change is happening at a quicker pace than it did just a short while back and familiar patterns are easily outdated. What you see is quite rarely what you get. Leaving home for an extended period of time might seem like sweet freedom—from a distance—yet having to adapt to a new environment, navigating social relationships with new people, keeping up with different study projects and going through exam sessions can put a serious strain on someone who has to deal with all this for the first time. It’s going to be difficult but know that it’s not purposeless; you get to improve your education and accumulate life experience that will definitely serve you well, later.

A word of caution: college might look like a safe buffer zone to test real life scenarios from but, remember, every action has a reaction and you should always use reason and free will to guide your choices.

The Bottom Line

Make no mistake: student life is real life, with real issues and real consequences. As long as you understand that accomplishment and failure (naturally) go hand in hand and you’re accountable for both, your life toolbox is already solid—rely on it to stay the course.