I have been here two years now and I can say that the hardest time I had here at Tech were the first two weeks of my freshman year. I come from Saginaw, MI, which is about 10 times bigger than Houghton, and I was the valedictorian of my high school class. So I believed I was so good that college would be a breeze. Boy was I wrong.

My first day was a mild Saturday. My mom and my sister took my stuff to my room, and helped me unpack and then left on Sunday. Now I was on my own for the first time in my life. I had no one to answer to and I had perpetual freedom. On Sunday I got organized and on Monday I started orientation. The next day I took my first college test. It was a spatial visualization test. I opened the test booklet and I looked at the first few problems, and I said “huh.” It was then I knew I was in for a long ride. All of the shapes and their different orientations were confusing to me. The test didn’t count towards anything, but I knew I had a long way to go. It was at this time that I realized that what I did in high school meant nothing, and college would be a lot harder than I thought.

The first class that I had problems with was my Chemistry class, and I thought that this would be one of my easiest classes, since I had a year of chemistry in high school. But I was about to be horribly surprised. When I came into class I was given a Basic Skills Assessment (BSA) which I had to complete on my own time. This test led to my first lesson on college: It is up to you to figure out where you are and to get help if you need it. Well, the BSA consisted of about 15-20 math and chemistry problems and I did not need to turn it back in or anything like that; it was just for me to see where I was and to get help if I needed it. Well to make a long story short, I could only do about 4 of the questions on that sheet. I was so disheartened, I wanted to quit, but I stayed but then I thought: “If I left school, what would I do?” I couldn’t go home, otherwise I would have to work at some dead end job and I didn’t want that, so I decided to tough it out and keep with it. The rest of the week went ok, I went to my classes and they went well but I was still having trouble with chemistry, so I went to the learning center (I was required to go due to my low Math ACT score), and I talked it over with my learning center coach, and eventually Chemistry became less and less of a problem for me.

Being in college has taught me that I had to do a lot of things differently. For example, I can no longer wait until Sunday night to do a paper and turn it in the next day and expect a good grade on it, or that I can’t study for a test the day before and expect to get a good grade on it. Instead I constantly review the material in each of my classes. Also when an exam is coming up, I take at least 3 days to review the material, in addition to keeping up with the pace of a class. If I have a paper to do, I start on it the day I get the assignment, and I work on it a little at a time until I finish. The key to studying is to pace yourself. You don’t want to do too much too fast, yet you don’t want to wait until the last minute to get things done. Also another thing that you can do is to go to your professor’s office hours. Many of the professors here are nice, and are willing to help you. Which leads me to another thing that separates college from high school: Help is available, but only to those who seek it.