Transitioning From high school to college

So you've made the epic journey from high school to college. Congratulations!! For some of you this particular journey may have been difficult while for others it was nothing more than a piece of cake. I see you now wear the College Freshman badge of honor. Wear it proudly but remember, do not boast. Hundreds of thousands of others have been right here at this crucial cross section where you are now. Your new voyage begins now since you have made the walk from child to young adult.

You have only been in college for a few months and you have already had your fair share of hurdles and bumps in the road. Maybe you made a common Freshman mistake by unwisely registering for classes late, giving you no room to choose your own schedule and professors, which for you was mistake number one. You could have even chose to accept advice that was not so sound about a problem class of yours. Despite your gut instinct to not change a class, you felt that your decision was deemed necessary to further your future at Miami Dade College. And afraid you might come up short, you inevitably took the guidance given and changed one of your classes. This in turn created a domino effect on your whole schedule, making it look dramatically different.

And even with all of this mess you've found out you've created, more trouble was yet to come. I know what comes after these detail of events. "Because of what you thought to be trusted advice, that turned out to be just as bad as a rotten apple, your whole schedule changed."Am I right? Originally all of your classes were covered by financial aid, but with that one little change you, the helpless Freshman, that you would have to come up with your own money to pay for a class. So keeping all that in mind you sucked up my pride, owned up to your mistake and buckled up for a whole new experience. Let me guess?

What you learned quickly is that in college you have to pay for everything, whether by financial aid or out of pocket, everything is money oriented and everything is expensive: books, classes and fees. Yep that pretty much sounds like college alright. In high school, especially public schools, the school already issues you books or your parents had to pay for a sixty dollar hard cover that would last you the whole year in that one class. You just didn't have to worry about buying multiple books for multiple classes in a short period of time. Now have you learned your lesson yet? Well, good! Do not let this stressful experience deter you from finding a good role model during your college experience. Nor should you let it discourage you from taking risks and sticking to your guns.

Now that you've seen the errors of your ways I will give you three game plans to further your success as a College Freshman, not only will you be able to keep these tips for Freshman year but throughout out your stay in college and long after. One of my first strategies for you is to seek out an older more mature individual from the Mentoring Program at the college or university you attend. Hopefully you'll choose to be at Miami Dade College for your first two years. Since you might not have had that significant guidance at your high school, this choice may even push you ahead to succeed in your future career. You should look forward to receiving advice from a trusted source that has your very best interest at heart and wants nothing but the best for you in your future endeavors.

Since you may have never had a mentor before, you should open your mind up to see this experience as something, fresh and new. This will be one of your first but not last new experiences in college I’m sure. You should begin getting in the mind frame of college as a whole new world where opportunities are abundant. In college the resources are not only plentiful but almost endless. In high school there were always some kind of restrictions from achieving what you set out to do.  Right now it is vital that you focus and keep your eyes on the prize because you are now closer than you have ever been to your dreams and aspirations. In fact so close that you can almost touch it. Now in college your professors and new peers see you as an adult, a stark contrast to life in high school when you had teachers that babied you and your classmates to the highest degree.

They carried your classmates and perhaps yourself, along without much enthusiasm, merely passing along students who did not care. Perhaps the administration was the most patronizing, they may be treated the students like children. And you've notice although there were some teachers that babied their students, there were some that actually cared. In college there’s no middle man holding a student’s hand nor is there any one screaming down students’ throats. A student has different choices they can pick.  They can either come to class and learn or not come to class, do no work and fail the class.

And unlike high school where if you fail a class you have to pay out of pocket for said class. So I have decided that planning both my short term and long term goals in a reasonable time frame, is essential to my success in college. My second strategy for you will be time management, I have seen both in my senior year in high school and my Freshman year in college that time management is essential for everyone's overall sanity as a college student. Whenever I had gotten lazy no one could get me to do anything. Not homework, classwork or quizzes, all I want to do is bundle up and go to sleep. With this type of thinking I have majorly affected myself whenever I needed assignments to be completed.

For instance, in my virtual Music class there were a list of assignments that must be completed during an assigned time period. For part three of chapter nine I was so lazy and run down I didn't even attempt to do any of the work. My grade went down from a high A to a D. If I had managed my time more effectively I wouldn't have felt over stressed and skipped my assignments. My grade would have stayed an A and I wouldn't have had to ask my professor for makeup work. Time management and the way you choose what’s important in your life will be a huge factor in how smooth the rest of your Freshman year goes.

When in my senior year of high school, I could slip by with my careless time management skills, and get away with it. I found out quickly that in college I won’t be able to get by with these types of choices and neither can you. College is just too fast paced and advanced for you to slack off and try to make up work. With all this in mind I came up with my third strategy for you, which is to use math labs and tutors as a tool during your two years at Miami Dade College.  If you know you’re not the best at math, to be able to keep up in your math class, you might want to decide to ask for some extra assistance in order to pass the class. Plan days when you have free time to go met up with a math tutor.

You could create these free time periods around your class schedule. A goal to remember is to go before and after classes start. Creating a relationship with a math tutor that can connect with you will be a huge advantage you have over your peers. It can aid you in your assignments and will be beyond beneficial in your two years college journey at Miami Dade College. You really are ambitious, you have dealt with schedule changes, financial aid problems, misguided advice and a huge list of books you had to pay for in your very first year. So on and make me proud. You are now interested in the Mentoring Program, getting assistance from math tutors in the math labs and figuring out a way to manage your time effectively and efficiently.  Using the many resources available at Miami Dade College and keeping time management in mind, I predict that the rest of your two years will include many advantages and opportunities to your future education journey _KM