No One Could Have Prepared Me; I Had to Go Through it Myself

Coming into university, I had many different views on what it was going to be like. People tried to tell me: family, friends and even my older siblings shared their stories and their experiences. Never once did I think to myself that my experience would be any different than theirs.

When I got here, though, it was nothing at all like I expected. After my first day of classes, my whole view changed. It was almost as if I hadn’t heard any of those stories.

I found it really intimidating and overwhelming to make the transition from high school. In high school, I knew what teachers wanted because they laid everything out for us. In university, nothing is laid out, so you either don't know what the prof wants or once you finally figure it out, you get confused because another prof teaching the exact same thing to another section will want something different. And then you go to another class next term and the prof teaches and wants assignments done in a completely different style. Nothing seems the same, so you have no idea what to expect any more. If you don’t figure out what the prof wants soon enough, it would be a severe handicap and would make it almost impossible to do well in the course.

For one thing, there's just so much more. It's not so much that the work is hard, just that most of it is new, it goes so much faster, and there's such a lot more material you have to know about. What would take you a month in high school would take less than a week here. There's never a sense that you've finished. It just comes at you and keeps coming. When you take a break, you tend to feel guilty because there's always something you could be doing.

When I studied in high school, I would start making study notes a couple of weeks before the exam. But here, there's not time do that. You have to make your study notes as soon after your lecture as you can to get them out of the way. It's easier to make the condensed notes right away, because you can remember what went on in the class itself. Also, you can incorporate things from the textbook that seem important; again easier if the material is fresher in your mind.

You have to learn the various meanings of the word 'read'. Sometimes it means that you have to know pretty well every word so it might take you a whole evening to read fifty pages. Other times, it couldn't possibly mean that because there is just too much of it there. So you have to be selective and use some street smarts to decide what you actually need to pay attention to.

Sometimes if you are writing a paper, you can just leaf through the book, find a few parts of it that interest you, and then use those in the paper. If you do this, you might be able to 'read' the book in less than an hour. Other times, you can go even further. You can go through the book, find maybe four sentences that are relevant to what you are doing, and put them into a paper or a seminar contribution. The prof recognizes where they come from and concludes that you have read the book. Well, in a way I guess you have. But it is not the same as spending a whole evening on fifty pages. But you have to somehow know what the prof expects and often he does not tell you what he expects. And I think more than any of us know, even he does not know what he expects.

It took a while, not until after the first set of midterms, for me to get used to everything and to know how best to do the work. At that point, even though each class was different, I got a pretty good idea of what the profs wanted and what I needed to know -- what was expected, what was important to do, and what not important. It was easier to study for exams and I felt a lot more confident about them. It's hard to describe how it happens; it takes a while, but you just seem to get to know how to handle things, and to be confident that you'll be right most of the time.

I don't think you can find out from anyone how to prepare yourself for what it's going to be like. It's something you have to experience for yourself. University is just like a movie: you can't take anyone else's word for how it will seem to you. You have to go yourself and see it and deal with it yourself.