Freshman year of college means no longer having the same group of friends since elementary school, the teachers who know your parents or, of course, the homemade food. As freshmen finish their first year at Binghamton University, they can look back on their accomplishments and the obstacles they had to overcome while adjusting to college life.
For a lot of students, their first year was just as good as, or even better than, what they thought it would be.
“I knew it would be a lot of work and I was right and I knew it would be totally weird but awesome to be away from my family, but I never thought I would make such great friends so quickly here,” Paige Cervantes, a freshman psychology major who is pre-health, said. “They’ve made school feel like home.”
Freshman philosophy, politics and law major Aylon Pesso had different preconceived notions about college.
”I originally envisioned college where everyone just laid out in the grass on their laptops all day, talking, going on random walks and adventures and just relaxing,” Pesso said.
After his first year Pesso said that college was a lot more work than he imagined and that people are a lot lazier.
Most of these freshmen told Pipe Dream that they wished they had gotten more involved with on-campus organizations in their first semester.
“My freshman year was great and I met a lot of people; I just wish I was more social from the get-go,” said Kiran Kirshnasamy, a biochemistry major.
Pesso also would have changed his first semester by being more social and getting more involved.
“I really didn’t take advantage of everything that there is here, right at my fingertips,” he said.
Getting more involved isn’t the only thing that matters to freshmen. Another commonality is they want to keep their grade point averages (GPA) up.
“I want to find a perfect medium between hard work and good fun,” Cervantes said.
Carly Grimes, an undeclared freshman, agreed and added that she plans to keep her GPA up and become a psychology major while maintaining all of her friendships.
Another goal of Kirshnasamy was to not only do well in school but to “make an impact in everything [he does].”
One lesson that Cervantes and other freshmen learned at BU was to be less naive.
“Just because they give you a whole week before classes to get settled doesn’t mean you should spend that whole week Downtown,” Cervantes said. “Just because you have no parents to come doesn’t mean that the number of drinks you have can be limitless.”
While freshman year is over for these students, their college careers have just begun.