As I approach the beginning of my senior year, there is only one important piece of advice I can give to those of you who are just about to begin your time at the University: Get to know the people in your major and do it quickly.
It’s difficult to form close friendships on a campus of over 40,000 students, especially when everyone is on a different schedule. It’s not like kindergarten days when you can go up to another kid, ask to share crayons and automatically become friends.
So when you arrive on campus in August, it might be a little overwhelming going from seeing your high school friends in class every day to possibly not having any of your friends in your classes.
Sure, you can always take your easy general education classes with your friends, but once you get into the required core classes for your major, it pays off to know your classmates.
I came into the University as a broadcast journalism major, and I soon realized that there aren’t too many of us roaming around campus. The classes I have to take for my major are small, and there are usually only about 12 people in each class.
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You might think that you don’t need to become friends with the people in your major because you have other friends that you can count on. But trust me, those friends aren’t going to help you when you have a question for homework specific to your major, and they surely won’t be any help to you when you’re trying to study for a test.
Without the friends in my major, I wouldn’t have been able to keep sane during our late nights in the TV lab trying to edit our projects that were due in the morning.
Any of my friends outside of my major would be clueless to any of the problems that I run into as a journalism major, so it’s relieving to know that I can easily call up one of my journalism friends if I have a problem.
So get to know those people in your major from the start. You don’t want to be that person whose name is called at graduation and everyone asks “Who’s that?”
Maggie is a senior in Media. She can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @maggiehuynh.
