Homesickness?

How are you dealing with it, if you are at all? I know some students don’t even really miss home, and I don’t think that that is a bad thing at all; I think that that just means that they’ve settled in to their new environment really quickly, and considering the fact that SUNY Oswego is technically our new home, that’s probably not a bad thing to have happen.

I know that I am dealing with it, though. I wouldn’t say that it is to the extreme, but there are definitely a lot of things about my old life back at home that I am really starting to miss. Firstly, there’s my friends from home, who are all very important to me each in their own way, and I miss them a lot. It’s hard not having them with me since they were with me every day in high school! I think that’s normal though. College isn’t just one transition. Your life undergoes many, many changes that, for some people, just take some time to get used to.

There’s always some aspects of being home itself too that are dear to me that I miss. I remember a few months ago when my younger brother and I used to buy Monster energy drinks from Nice & Easy and watch episodes of LOST and pull an all-nighter, and then I’d sleep in until noon. Those were good times! I remember having my friend Zach over and staying up until 2 a.m. watching Sweeney Todd as he covered his eyes with his blanket every time Sweeney kills someone. I remember my friends Andrea, Laura, David, Mike and I as we took a half-hour road trip to see Pineapple Express only to be denied admission because not all of us had IDs, which resulted in us wandering around Wal-Mart.

These are things that I know aren’t ever going to happen again with those people until I go back home, and thoughts like that are what’s driving my nostalgia. I’m not going to say that I don’t like it here, because I do. I just figured that I’d share some of my memorable experiences from home, which we all have, most probably more exciting than mine.

I guess that it’s kind of like a bridge that you have to cross where one end of it is the life you’re used to and the other end is college life, and let’s face it, there are many of those bridges in our lives. There was the bridge that we had to cross between elementary school and middle school and then another one to high school. I think that the one leading to college has probably been my longest so far, maybe even my narrowest, but with every transition comes adaptation, so I guess I’m just still taking my time on that bridge, one step at a time. It has definitely been an interesting experience though!

Grades

Yesterday, I received my first official grade here at SUNY Oswego, and I have to say that it was one that I was very surprised to have received. I consider myself to be a good writer, or at least, I know that, for the most part, writing is something that I enjoy doing. I don’t enjoy receiving writing assignments from professors, but it’s not because I don’t want to do the writing itself; it’s because I know that it’s going to take time away from my day, a lot of it if there is a lot of it to do.

Anyway, my point is that I am not used to receiving low grades on papers. Tests, yes. I am not and never have been very good at test-taking, even if I try to study. However, when it comes to papers, I think I may have received one C last year, but that’s it.

I received a D on my first Sociology paper. My first D, mind you. I thought I did everything I was supposed to do. I thought I followed the directions. I ultimately thought that I had completed the assignment in a satisfactory manner, but the professor had loaded the paper up with comments.

What this shows me is that I am not in high school anymore, and I have work to do. I guess that Sociology isn’t looking for the type of paper I’d write for English, and I’m going to pay close attention to the mistakes that I made and improve on them for my next paper, for which I am going to shoot for at least a B.

So, if you’re reading this, don’t make the same mistake that I did and think that the effort that you put into your work in high school is going to be the same amount of effort that you put into your work here in college, because it’s not. High school teachers warned me of this. I remember one in particular, an English teacher who has had a major influence on me, who said that he recalls receiving a D on a paper early in his college career, and he recalls the feeling of complete astonishment that he felt seeing it, so I guess maybe I should have kept that in mind when I eagerly awaited to see my grade in class, eagerly expecting a B, but was shocked to see a D instead, and now that I have undergone that hopefully one-time experience, at least in Sociology, I know that I have something I need to work on.

Workload

As a freshman here at SUNY Oswego, coming from high school was a very big change for me, as I think it is for most students my age. I was expecting college to be different from high school only through the fact that instead of being provided with a mere locker in the hallway, I’d have my own room. Well, it wouldn’t exactly be my own room; I’d be sharing it with a roommate, but I was excited about that. I was excited to meet someone and share a room with him, live with him and get to know him. However, what I was not expecting was the drastic change in the amount of homework I’d receive.

In high school, I took a fair amount of college-level courses that I actually received college credit for. I took SUPA English which consisted of two courses, a composition course and a narrative culture course. I also took AP Literature and MVCC Economics and MVCC Government. In addition, I took an MVCC French course. However, they didn’t really prepare me for the amount of work I am receiving as a college student, the reading especially. Of course, I really shouldn’t say that, because if all of my high school courses had been college-level courses, then maybe it would have been different, but now I am receiving, on average, three to four hours of reading to do every night, and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration, and I’m not a procrastinator. In fact, in high school I often was ahead of schedule and completed assignments well before they were due, so I would hate to see how stressful it must be for students who do procrastinate!

However, I am not associating this with a negative experience so far in any way. The heavy workload is merely something I am not used to, and only time is going to change that. I have been thoroughly enjoying my stay here at SUNY Oswego. I love the campus, the faculty and staff is very friendly and seemingly altruistic and friends have also, for the most part, been easy to make. I have always been a hard worker as far as school is concerned, so in time, I will learn how to manage my time and get work done in a timely fashion while still finding time to have fun, but, again, I definitely love it here so far!