We all know and love our freshman year of college. It’s exciting to meet new people, go to your first college party and start living in your home away from home. But with that excitement, we bring our high school lifestyle, rebellious nature and our diaper masks for those nights we get poop faced. Perhaps in all of the excitement, we forget about the important things.

Your first year of college and your first step entering into the real world are exciting, but challenging at the same time. You take on a whole new set of responsibilities. The most important thing to remember during your freshman year is to make sure you take care of yourself.

Getting wasted with your friends is appealing. It’s easier to introduce yourself to other people when you have taken a couple shots of “liquid courage,” but in the end it’s not that great. You turn into “that guy” or “that girl” who everyone is pointing and laughing at.

You wake up in a pile of your own puke, half your eyebrow is missing and a letter on your chest reads that you’re on academic probation.

We all struggle with the same issues our freshman year and most of the time it is with academics.

“At the end of fall semester I was just partying way too much. I had a hard time keeping up with grades and finals were kicking my butt,” said Connor Treacy, a sophomore at CLU.

If you’re out partying until 2 a.m., you most likely won’t be showing up to your 8 a.m. class the next day. So while you should definitely maintain a social life, try and remember you are spending approximately $40,000 a year to get an education at California Lutheran University.

Aside from the academics, we all struggle with “the cool kid mentality.” We all walk out of high school mistaking confidence with arrogance.

“The most annoying thing was that my PA (peer advisor) wanted to go out and do stuff. Being young I thought I was too cool to go. We were too cool for school,” said Senior Resident Assistant Josh Appel.

You just need to be kind, be humble and be yourself. Self-respect and quiet confidence are attractive traits that we all tend to lose in our freshman year.

Go out to events on campus, participate in clubs, blast your music with the doors open in your dorm room and just be open minded to everything around you. You don’t want to reach your senior year and regret missing all of the free events and opportunities CLU has to offer.

“I wish I would have been more involved and more social. I wish I had gone out and made more friends when I had the opportunity to,” said Appel.

As fresh meat on campus, you struggle with finding friends, deciding what classes to take and even figuring out who you really are. Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone, but be responsible about it.

“Be whoever you want to be your freshmen year but be wise. Be cautious but make the most out of your experience,” said junior Danaelle Arroyo.

In time we realize that college is nothing like the movies. CLU does not have the Hollywood interpretation of what college is. Freshmen, I write this article not to bash on you, but to help you. See our mistakes, see our success, learn from your peers and remember everything is what you make of it.

Rafael Padilla
Staff Writer
Published Sept. 19, 2012