Week Six of our Diablog: which of the following have posed the greatest challenge to you in making the transition to college?

The greatest challenge I have had in transitioning to college has been having to face the fact that while going through the college process I lost the sense of purpose and passion, and that I no longer have a goal on the horizon to steer towards. The following (probably unnecessarily) extensive anecdote serves as a background to help understand what I mean by the loss I have experienced since going to college. If you’d like to skip it, that’s fine. I just wanted to write it out to help clarify my point.

In the environment in which I grew up it went without saying that you were going to attend college. The only question was where you would go. In many peoples’ opinions, your schoolwork and extracurricular activities determined that. In freshman and sophomore year of high school, I inwardly rolled my eyes at my peers who I knew were only doing activities such as writing for the student newspaper and running for student government because they wanted to put them on their college application. When I reached my junior year and began to get a feeling of the competition I was up against for the schools I wanted to go to, however, I started panicking. Thoughts such as: why have I been so centered on what I want to do, and not thought about what will look good on a sheet of paper; What actually sets me apart from the people with whom I am competing; Why didn’t I get a better grade in that class; kept me awake at night. I suddenly felt like I had become just one more statistic. Junior and senior year were devoted to the college search and process. I set aside the bigger dreams and passions about what I wanted to do with my life (in fact, I was specifically told never to use the word ‘passion’ on a college application essay) and concentrated on academia. I stopped participating in activities I truly enjoyed if they took up the time I could be spending on things that might help me get into a college I wanted to go to. Admittedly, many of these feelings probably came as a result of the cooker-pressure nature of my private school, where excellence was the norm and anything less than exceptional was unacceptable, but I am sure that many people that went through and are currently going through the college process can relate, no matter where they came from.

Having been accepted into a college, I share the generic goals of other students in that I want to get my B.A. and then find job, but at the same time, I want to do things I love and pursue a career path in something that really interests me. Coming to Bryn Mawr, I realized that my academic anxiety has completely consumed me for the past few years. It is almost as though I’ve been hurtling towards the goal of sitting in a dorm room and studying for so long that I’ve forgotten life continues once you’ve achieved that. Instead of sitting in my room studying with a sense of pride and satisfaction, I feel a sense of confusion and loss. Hopefully within the next few semesters I’ll regain this sense of passion and purpose that I was advised to suppress in my last few years of high school.

I’d like to end with the following disclaimer:

I realize my story is only possible due to my privileged upbringing. I attended a private school, and did not have to worry about tuition when deciding what college to go to. In addition, I had the luxury of being able to do activities such as piano lessons and ice hockey if I so chose to. I also will not have to worry as much as others about finding a high paying job after leaving college, and have the privilege to explore careers to the point that I am able to settle in one that gives me a sense of fulfillment. I know few people are this lucky, and so it goes without saying that, in many ways, my sense of confusion is fairly trivial in comparison to the challenges other people face.

I did have a hard time to make the transition to college as an international student. When looking back, I found those thoughts and experience really meaningful to me. And at this special moment, I actually can feel the bond between me and little Bee. Even though my story was not so tough, the hidden emotion is connected in a subtle way. Both of us don't need to think about the problem of exclusiveness since we just not belong to the country.

At the very beginning of the semester, while we have talking about exclusiveness and the most uncomfortable space on campus, honestly, sometimes I think about that I am the unfortunate person there since this is not the country I grow up. Meanwhile, when I can make connections between those two different culture and make an interesting comparison and contrast. I know that most of my peers just don't have the same context. Those thoughts are permissive especially when I am upset, which remind me of the different assimilated stages in St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories. IT's not the problem of nostalgia. I study hard and I am unhappy. I know it's not me. The transition comes after fall break. So I drop a class and start to get evolved in this community. Then, I decide to do attribute a portion of my time to do things beyond academic work, joining clubs, doing performance and volunteering both on-campus and off-campus.

So I feel better now, even out of my expectation. And I start to ponder the role of interaction within one community and the society. College is a place where the boundary can be really blurring and easy to cross.

For me, moving so far away from home has been one of the most challenging aspects of transitioning into college. I am an only child from Wisconsin, so moving to Pennsylvania has been challenging in that I am now a little over 1000 miles from the beautifully snowy and wonderfully chilly city I call home. I also admit that I have a bit of “only child syndrome” and I’m having a difficult time adjusting into not being so reliant on my parents. My decision to move so far away, ironically, spawned from the reasons I now miss home so much. I wanted independence, to have a sense of self-reliance, and to have some distance from my ever-loving parents (avoiding the negative 10 degree Fahrenheit winter weather was an added bonus). But now that I’m really here, I miss my parents dearly and I long for those snowy and bitterly cold winter days.

Ultimately though, I know that this experience is really good for me. I feel like I have, in fact, become more self-reliant and I definitely feel that I have asserted my independence. Being so far away, though difficult, has allowed me to explore myself more and to get a better sense of who I am. I am so grateful for the experiences that I am being offered here at Bryn Mawr, despite the challenges of missing home, because I know that these experiences are making me so much stronger as an individual.

Leaving home has been the hardest aspect of transitioning to college for me for many reasons, many of which I never forsaw, but have popped up over the course the semester.

I have always been really close to my mom, and over the years I feel like our relationship has actually become a bond mirroring that of a best friend. And in a way, moving away from home and into college has sometimes put strains on this relationship. At the beginning of the semester, I called every chance I had to talk to her, and basically keep her up-to-date with every minor detail of my life at Bryn Mawr. As time passed however, and work began to catch on, and I began to make many friends in classes, around campus, and in the dorm, I felt like I was calling less and less often. I felt like work at college was overtaking my ability and time to talk to my mom. Obviously, our relationship felt a little bit different, as though we had too much to catch up on whenever we did talk and I guess we just decided to stick to simple conversations.

Aside from this, it's been hard to be away because I come from a pretty big family, my immediate family of five and my grandparents from both sides. Like any family, there are problems thta go on at home: someone not passing his classes, someone who wants to be a freelance musician for a living when our parents see no future in that, someone who gets really sick and needs to go to the hospital. Whenever even the smallest thing happens at home, I feel like it is my responsibility to be there, to be of some help to fix that problem. Instead, I am sitting an hour and a half away-- close enough to feel like I need to go back and do something, but just far enough that I can't.

For these reasons, I feel like I've, in a way, become part of the Bryn Mawr bubble to the point of being so detached from the rest of my family. At the same time, though, I have come across so many moments when I wish I could just return home and help fix whatever is broken. In light of this, I hope that Bryn Mawr can comfortably be my home away from home, but that I never get so comfortable here that I feel a loosening tie to my family and home in New Jersey and a new tie to Bryn Mawr, in its place.

I voted for starting new relationships as my biggest college challenge. As an only child in both my family and my neighborhood and coming from a small high school, being comfortable amongst my peers is a relatively new experience for me. I had just settled into a strong group of friends back home towards the end of my junior year... just in time to begin college applications and shop for my graduation dress. My biggest anxiety over the summer was what would happen with my friends from home and finding new friends in college. As many freshman have experienced, this semester I have been in and out of friends/groups of friends and some friendships from home have faded without the everyday contact. This is all, however, is just part of college life. I am simply looking at my experiences as discovering my friends. While this faster-paced social environment is a lot for me to take in, I think it's healthy and I look forward to seeing how my life here as an Owl unfolds.

I think that this was a very difficult question for me to answer because there were so many challenges in my transition to college. I think that ultimately my biggest challenges were deciding where I wanted to go to college and leaving my family, friends, and boyfriend behind. I was very undecided with what college I wanted to go to—to be quite honest, Bryn Mawr was not even in my top three choices. My family and friends were all convinced that I was going to stay down South for college (which is what I really wanted). I knew that I would be closer to my parents, the weather would be nice all year round, and I could still continue to play soccer and run track at amazingly athletic schools—but something just wasn’t right. I knew that ultimately I wanted academically rigorous institution and the schools that I was looking at down south didn’t fit all my expectations; I wanted to be challenged and I wanted to be on my own and make decisions for myself. Choosing Bryn Mawr was a very hard decision but a very good one at that. It was hard to leave the people that I loved the most but I knew that it would be worth it in the end. I think that what has been the most challenging is not having my parents here with me (in college) to reassure me, give me constant advice and support, help me make decisions, and to just be there for me when I need them. This is not to say that they aren’t always here for me but it’s just not the same when they aren’t physically around. I put this upon myself because I chose Bryn Mawr; I knew that I wouldn’t be able to see my family as often and I’m often really sad about it because I truly do miss them but at the same time I have developed so much independence within myself which has given me a lot of maturity and strength to be positive about my transition in college so far. 

I choose leaving homeas my biggest challenge in making transition to college. Leaving home for me does not only mean move from a country to another country, but also means being more mature and introspective than most of my peers. Since my parents re far way in China, and they are not familiar with systems here in America, the help that can get from them is very limited. I stepped into a new world which I only have myself to rely on—I must make decisions and cope with everything by myself.  Looking back the past three months, I feel that I experienced the stages that Karen Russell wrote in her book St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. When I just arrived in America, everything was new and interesting for me. For the first time, strangers on the street smiled to me! It was interesting to start my new life in a totally different country. Then things became harder as I realized that I must work to adjust the new culture. Life was stressful a strong sense of dislocation took over me. Though now I’ve become more comfortable for my new environment, whenever I think about the fact that there are only several days left for going back home, I still get so excited.  I gradually realize that my home is always where my root is.

To tell the truth, before I really came to the States, living in a country that thousands of miles away from home, I never knew the taste of homesickness. I spent all of my past eighteen years in one city-- I am so familiar with everything in the city that I was almost tired of it. I determined to go to a different place that far away from home to get some fresh air and to explore the world.  But now, when I’m really in a foreign country that truly far away from home, I finally realize how much my home means to me. Jinan, is not only the name of a city, it is also a place that witnesses how all the things that make me who I am now happened. It’s where I can take a walk without worrying about getting lost; it’s where I’m not afraid of walking alone on empty streets at night; it’s where I can have a sense of belonging and secure. Through my experience in the past three months, I realize that how challenging living far away from home and how strong the connection between me and my home.

Coming to Bryn Mawr was weird coming from a small town like Annandale. That made adjusting to college and its changes e.g. finances and money and relationships. I have always been close to people due to the fact that I was from a small town but being at college is like that as well. It is different however in that, I must work around people's schedules- decidely busy schedules whereas back home there's not really much to do so everyone's free all the time. Finances and money changed as well because life is expensive! That probably sounds really naive but I hadn't realized before exactly how expensive it is. Having a job that supports me versus simply pays for my recreation is strange but awesome. Getting paychecks makes me happy because the money is all mine, all mine.

I chose "leaving home" for this poll. Before arriving at BMC, one of the greatest appeals of college to me was escaping from high school. I left my high school friends on a bad note, and to me, nothing sounded better than meeting new, genuine, people and Bryn Mawr and cutting off past ties all but completely. However, in my haste to run away from THS and everyone there, I neglected to realize how much of an effect leaving home would have on me. In high school, home was my safety zone, and a lot of the time, my parents and sister were the only people I felt like I could trust. Thankfully, I found what I was looking for at Bryn Mawr. Now that I have a supportive group of friends, I find myself needing a safety zone less and less, which luckily works out now that my family is about 2,700 miles away. However, the bond that I formed during those tough times hasn't been broken, and I find myself missing the comforts I left behind. I love Bryn Mawr, but it's not quite home. And while I try not to be constantly missing California, there's alway something in the back of my mind that's counting down the days until next break. 

I chose "leaving home" and "finances/money" as the most difficult challenges for me during my transition to college. My life revolved around my family before I started college. My mom's a single mother and I had to help her take care of my five younger siblings so it was kind of hard to avoid them on the daily. We're a really close family and it was very difficult for me at the beginning of the school year to adjust: to not wake up and see them running around or to not being able to eat my mom's food. When I went home for Thanksgiving break, it felt like I was a guest in the house. Things changed - my room didn't feel like my room, the daily routines were different, and for some odd reason, I didn't feel like I belonged. Of course I know my family missed me and they didn't shun me but I think I'm struggling to get to used to coming home after living away from home for months at a time.

It's also difficult to manage your finances while you're in college. Nobody warns you not to buy that sweater onliine - you learn how to manage your money the hard way. Like when you find out you have like, twenty bucks in the bank. And I know I am not the only one who has to deal with this. My friends and I have to check each other when we spend and we often joke about being in the "danger zone" with our bank accounts (when you have less than $100 in the bank). If I'm broke and need something, I can't really call my mom to lend me some cash, which is okay. My mom never readily whipped out cash for me in high school anyways so I understood the value of her hard-earned money, but it is a wake up call. I have to be accountable for my actions and learn how to restrain myself from buying ridiculous things. And I'm learning to pick up on extra shifts at work if I need the extra money. There's something really nice about getting paid from a hard week's' worth of work.

I picked "other" because the biggest challenge for me kind of encompasses all of the choices above.  As many of the Bryn Mawr students know, I am a non-traditional student.  This means that I'm older than a typical student and that there was some time between when I graduated high school and when I started college.  I am 32 years old and I started college at 29.  Prior to deciding to start college, I had a full time job, my own apartment and a typical "twenty-something" llifestyle. For me, deciding to let all of those things go was very difficult.  Returning to school meant that I would have to actually return home since I wouldn't be able to work enough to pay rent, let go of some of my relationships and friendships because some of them were not supportive of my decision, learn how to make friends with people who are almost young enough to be my kids, learn to live with a lot less money than I did when I worked two jobs, and I had to choose a school where I would be able to be myself.  

If I had to pick one of those things, I would pick ending relationships.  It's very dfficult to admit that many of my friends were not supportive of my decision and, when I first began to understand this, I was very sad.  However, once I got past my initial sadness, I ended up with a much greater appreciation for those who are still there for me, and for the new friends I have made.  I'm constantly surprised by how much I can fnd in common with people.

I am surprised that so many people choose "start new relationships". At first, I think it is just the problems of minority students. However, now I recognize that it's the issue for many of us. To me, it's very hard to make friends with American students due to cultural and language barriers. Most students at Bryn Mawr are totally nice, but they feel bored to talk to me because we don't have things in common. Some Americans recognize that problem and they try hard to bridge the gap. They attempt to navigate the conversations to the topics I know. But some just don't bother spend time getting to know me. Some look at my circle of friends and they think that I'm odd. They just want to stay away from me so they don't look odd like me. That's because they have many choices of friends around. Several Chinese students also don't want to make friends with me because I don't speak their language. Some of them even think that I am not worth making friends with because I am the minority. The first time in my Japanese class, I sat between two Chinese girls. However, when the professor asked us to practice speaking Japanese, she just skipped me to talk to the Chinese girl, and it happens all the time. Some people are just indifferent and reckless with my heart for no reason. Sometimes at Bryn Mawr, I have the feeling of exclusion. However, I am glad that most girls at Bryn Mawr are nice and open-minded. I have some very close friends and many potential close friends. My friends  said that girls at Bryn Mawr are much better than other colleges. Until now, I am still glad to be a part of this college and I feel fortunate that I have many friends. And I will never give up to bridge the gap between me and American students as well as some international students from other cultures. I am really willing to learn from them, to explore the lives in different countries and understand how they think.

I would say start new relationships is the hardest part for me though I found choosing a college is also a frustrating yet happy process(I gotta choose between a great big public school located in west and a great small private school located in east). Besides the fact that for a freshmen, college experience is equally new to everyone, I have an extra challange, I study and live in a new country. People around me now are different, including classmates, friends, teachers, etc. Culture aroung me is also different. What people think is also different. From environment to food, from ideas to customes, they are all different. But coming to a new country means to exposure yourself to new experiences. I think I've learned a lot during this process and I appreciated I chose to finish my undergraduate degree in America. Despite all the good news, I found that it's really hard there if there's no one who can really understand you from your point of view(more focused on the demographic and culture reasons why I think in this or in that way); you will feel isolate and lonely sometimes. The feeling is like you've losted your root/essence. I've experienced that kind of feeling for a few weeks, but luckily, I found some friends who can really understand me there(including both Americans and international students)! Being aboard all by myself, even though it's hard, but after I've went through this process, I will find all the things I've done and all the relationships I've had were built up all by myself. And thats the time to feel the feeling of accomplishment. Due to the language and culture affections, I've found it's more difficult to find good friends here in America than in China. Also I've noticed some Americans does not like to become friends with international students. So the choices of friends become less and plus there are certain culture differences that always exist between international students and domestic students, so the friends range become even smaller. I think that's why I found starting new relationships here are more difficult. But I believe as time goes by, I will get more used to the environment and have more friends:D