Hey queens! I hope you all had the best winter break and are ready to take on the next semester!!

My first semester of college was a whirlwind, as I’m sure is the case for most freshmen. It was scary, confusing, exciting, exhausting, and lots of fun. However, I made a lot of mistakes – which is totally okay – but the thing about mistakes is that we have to learn from them. So in this post, I will be outlining what I messed up last semester and what I’m changing this semester. It’s not always going to be easy and I’m not going to be perfect at it, but I hope that you guys can learn from this too. And if you made similar mistakes, maybe this will help you work on a plan to fix them. We WILL have an amazing academic comeback!!

1. Skipping Class

Everyone told me before I got to college that if you skip class, it snowballs. But I thought that if I skipped it just once or a few times when necessary or I needed to work on something else, I’d be fine. Spoiler: I was not fine. After skipping one lecture, I barely showed up to lecture again for the rest of the semester.

Something in your mindset shifts after skipping the first time. And by finals week, I realized how much it hurt my grades that I hadn’t gone. Attendance wasn’t mandatory but I hadn’t gotten enough information to study and do well on the exams without going to class and getting the notes and info. And it killed me that I knew that if I had just gone to class, I would have done so much better. I still passed the class, but barely – so to save my GPA, I am making a rule for myself this semester that I have to treat going to class so, so seriously, and the only time I will let myself skip is if I am sick.

Will I magically go to every single class every time now that I have this rule? Probably not. But self-reflection is the first step to self-improvement, and it’s worth a lot to try!

2. Skewed Priorities

Obviously there are lot of things we all have to balance while we’re here, and who am I to say that one thing is more or less important than another. But on a personal level, one thing that really affected my wellbeing last semester were my priorities and how exactly I prioritized them. It being my first semester, I focused so much the first couple months on finding and building good relationships with other people. I am an extrovert and finding ‘my people’ was so, so important to me – and still is. But I was spending so much time seeking out friendships that I neglected to maintain other things that were also important to me – like forgetting to call my family or choosing to spend the time I had studying doing other things instead. And then in the last couple months of the semester, I was focused so much on academics that I started to struggle with building on these friendships that I had found. This resulted in me being disorganized, stressed, and all-around unhappier with myself.

So next semester, I would like to juggle all my priorities a little more consistently. For example, while my friends aren’t more important than my family or vice versa, both are obviously a huge priority and presence in my life and need the appropriate attention without it overshadowing anything else.

3. Prioritizing My Health

Last semester, I got so anxious about figuring out where I was going for each of my classes and stressed about getting there on time, and early, that I didn’t really give myself time to relax or even eat. I also often stayed up long nights to study or go out and didn’t prioritize my sleep as much as I should’ve. And on the days I had off, I was so tired I just rotted in bed all day and didn’t get up or stretch or eat good meals.

All of these things resulted in a burned out, low-energy, stressed version of myself that was not very fun to be around and I still ended up being behind on a lot of my to-do list items. So this semester, to all-around be a more productive and healthy person, I will be going to bed earlier and using my time during the day to cross off my to-do list things. I will aim for eating three full and balanced meals each day and not just mac and cheese – which I pretty much lived off of first semester. Overall this will help me so much better and way more energized and refreshed so I am ready to take on my workload each day.

I hope that everyone is prepared to have a productive and healthy semester!!! We can do this and we will be ok!!!

xoxox,

Haven