What Do You Expect from of Your Freshman Year

What do you expect from of your freshman year?

For the next thirty minutes, I want you to think about what you expect from your freshman year. I want you to think about all aspects of your life, including your education, friends, family, work, etc. Use the first 10-15 minutes to brainstorm. Then, use your brainstorming ideas to write a reflective essay to express your thoughts and feelings about the year.

Do not rush through this assignment. I want to learn more about you and the expectations that you hold for yourself. What are your goals? What do you hope to accomplish? What are your fears? How do you feel about school? How do you feel about the friendships you have? Be honest. I will be the only one reading your response… I promise!! You can always trust me.

Brainstorm on a separate sheet of paper. Write your essay below. Use the back if you need to.

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What I expected from my high school experience I have to admit that It is difficult for me to think so far into my past. I have been out of high school for twelve years now and high school is something that I had, in a sense, blocked out of my memory before this year. It’s not, by any means, because I had a terrible high school experience. It’s just that so much has happened since then that it is sometimes difficult to remember all of my memories from that time in my life. Now that I am working with high schoolers, I find myself reminiscing about my own memories from those four years. Of course my school was much different, but I believe that no matter the size of the school, high school is always going to have similar challenges and rewards for each individual student, no matter where they are. Let me start at the beginning – my freshman year of high school. What sticks in my mind the most about my first few days of high school is the shear magnitude of the change between middle school and high school. My middle school was large, however, it wasn’t anything compared to the size of my high school. My graduating class alone consisted of almost 500 students, therefore, the high school held approximately 1,500 - 2,000 students total each day. That is a scary thought and it is a huge amount of kids under one roof. I believe my biggest fear throughout my entire high school career was friendship and you can imagine with this amount of students, there were many different cliques around school. Many of those cliques formed as early as elementary school, so a lot of the students already knew everything about one another. When I began high school, I was basically the “new kid” and the other kids weren’t as open as I hoped they would be with my arrival. I always took it personally when someone didn’t want to approach me or get to know me, but now that I reflect back on it, I believe a lot of kids are, in a way, afraid to let a newcomer into their social circle. Eventually, my year became easier for me as I began to make new friends each day. Once friendships were made, however, you always had to worry about whether they would last. I remember hanging out with a larger group of girls on a regular basis. In total, there were probably ten of us, but it was shocking when all ten of us were actually getting along. What I mean by this is that high school girls are catty. Back when I was that age, it was easy for me or my friends to stab each other in the back because we had the rest of the group we could rely on. At any given time, there were always two or three girls that were “put out” of our group. They usually did something silly to make the rest of us mad, so we would ignore them for a few days and then, eventually, it would become someone else’s turn to be an outsider. I was an outsider a few times and I remember the hurt and frustration that I felt. It never feels good when others are mad at you, especially when you know that they are talking badly about you behind your back and especially when you know you did absolutely nothing wrong. I always felt like it was the end of the world when I was being treated like that, but it always ended quickly and the cycle would repeat over and over again. This was something that I had to get used to because it would continue for the next three years until my senior year. Friends really are the best and the worst memories that I carry with me in regards to those four years. When I think back on the education I received throughout high school, I also have mixed emotions. Throughout my freshman and half of my sophomore year, school came very easily for me and I was a fast learner. I didn’t feel the need to try that much, but that all began to change halfway through my sophomore year. Classes began to get a bit harder for me and I began to realize that I needed to try harder and put more effort into my work. I didn’t like the fact that I was doing poorly, so the easiest thing for me to do was to blame someone else for my failures. Some days it was my parents fault for not helping me enough; other days it was my teacher’s fault for not teaching me the material. I always had a reason to not except responsibility for myself. That was easier than admitting my faults. I thought I was smarter than every adult, so I refused to ever ask for help. Honestly, I looked at adults and wondered how they even functioned in the world because in me and my friend’s eyes, they were all a bunch of idiots. We teenagers knew so much more than they would ever know, or so we thought. So, my struggles with school began. Once my sophomore year ended and I began as a junior, my mindset had changed tremendously. Now, instead of my focus being on friendships, it was about boys. I began dating my high school boyfriend the summer before school began. I was in love. He was the only thing that was ever on my mind, which meant that I slowly started pushing away my best friends and I definitely pushed away my education. I never became a terrible student, but I began doing the bare minimum of what I needed in order to skim by. For the first time in my life, I began getting C’s in classes. I even received a few D’s and F’s on progress reports. I was always a person that held high expectations for myself, so luckily the D’s and F’s got me back in gear. Unfortunately I was satisfied with a C, which infuriated my parents and deep down, it infuriated me too. I made my way through my junior year and my GPA was much lower than in my earlier high school career, but who cared? I was still happy in love and, at the time, that is all that mattered to me. Once senior year started, I feel like I had an epiphany. In a sense, I feel like I grew into an adult over that last summer of school. I began to reflect back on the past several years of my life and I realized that I needed to make some changes. I began speaking to my guidance counselor about college preparation and I also began reflecting on what I had done to lose my friends. Of course, I was still totally in love with my boyfriend, so I decided that it would be easier for me to just make new friends and not worry about my old group so much. We had all changed so much from one another and grew into our own unique personalities, so it wasn’t a huge loss for me. My new group of friends were also friends with my boyfriend, so that made it easier on me as well. Unfortunately a lot of the group attended a different school, as did my boyfriend. Once school began my senior year, I was beyond excited. The county that I went to school in had something called a “Career Center”. This was a place that seniors could take college classes to prepare them for their career and future. The cool thing about the Career Center was that every school in the district was able to attend, so it was very similar to the college experience. This was also great for me because most of my new group of friends went to the center at the same time of day as me. I received opportunities to take classes that many American high school students didn’t at the time. I took sign language for two semesters, as well as AP Psychology and Photography. I was, again, in love with educating myself. I soon realized after applying to colleges that my past mistakes were now catching up with me. Slacking off my junior year really hurt me in the long run. I was waitlisted at several of my top choices for school, which was a huge blow to my self-esteem. How could I have let this happen to myself? I was always a bright child, but just a few mishaps in my education had a huge effect on my future. It all became very real to me at this point. Finally, I received a letter in the mail from UNC-Charlotte, the same school that my boyfriend and several friends had decided to go to. The letter announced that I had been accepted and I was beyond ecstatic. I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of my senior year. I looked forward to the future and I was really excited about moving out on my own and becoming independent from my family. Finally, the day arrived that I had been waiting for my whole life – graduation day. It was a wonderful day filled with family, friends, and other loved ones. It was also a day mixed with a lot of emotions. I was almost 18 years old. One part of me was attempting to hold on to my childhood with every ounce in me; the other part of me was pushing for me to leap into adulthood. I was caught in the middle. I didn’t know how to feel or what to think. I was excited to have accomplished the last thirteen years of my education, but I was scared to death about the next chapter in my life. Looking back at the day now, I wish I could have reassured myself that everything was going to fall into place for me, but that was so difficult to see and feel at the time. My high school years were not, by any means, my favorite years of my life. I actually think that they were the most difficult years that I have had. Teenagers are filled with such a huge amount of emotions and it is difficult to understand those emotions sometimes. Looking back, I realize how much I learned about myself and life during that time period. I also realize how much I grew over those short four years. My advice to high school students now would be to embrace every minute of your experience, whether it is good or bad. I know that some experiences you are going through seem to be the hardest thing in the world that you have had to deal with, but I promise that each one of these experiences is shaping you into the adult that you will one day become. Once those four years end, it feels as if they went by as fast as a blink of an eye. Hold on to your memories and learn as much as you can. Think about every experience as a learning experience because these experiences will help you tremendously in the future.