Mistakes: Your Own Can be Hard to See

I failed my first year of university. So I packed my bags and went home.

Looking back, I realize my mistakes.

I had too much free time. My bus ride home from campus was two hours so in between classes, I had to find ways to fill my time. Instead of staying on campus and doing my work, I would go to the mall and just hang out. Because I had so much free time, I figured there was always tomorrow, or the next day, or the weekend, to get things done. If a due date was three weeks away, I thought that was a lot of time, so procrastinating did not seem like a bad thing. Then due dates began to pile up, test dates started to come quickly, and what was previously a lot of time was suddenly no time. Even after some failed first semester courses, I couldn’t seem to work between classes. It wasn’t that I couldn’t study with other freshmen; I guess I figured that what worked in high school would work in college.

I didn’t pay enough attention to my poor math entrance test results. Because I didn’t do well enough on these tests, I had to take prerequisite courses for the math courses required for my major. In effect, they were prerequisites for prerequisities. So not only did I figure that they didn’t count for anything (a mistake which cost me dearly), I didn’t think about perhaps changing my major to something that involved fewer math courses. In retrospect, I should have paid attention to the reason for these low marks and the reason for these entrance tests: I sucked at math and was nuts to take a major which involved so many math courses.

When I received a letter telling me that my grades were too low to continue my studies, I didn't go and talk to anyone about it to figure out where I could go from there. I can’t exactly say what my mindset was at the time. It could have been school burnout. By the time I got the letter, I didn't look too much into my options because I figured I could be done with school and just get a job. I was young and wasn't thinking of the long-term.

A year of working in a dead end job that I didn't like reminded me of why I wanted a degree in the first place. So I decided to move on. I chose to go to Community College instead of back to the university. But this time, I switched my major to something with less math and with more core classes than electives. Each semester I could check another 3 or 4 courses off of my checklist so it felt like progress was happening faster.

At the Community College, the first few semesters didn’t seem much different from high school. But as time went on, classes became harder and the work more time-consuming. Taking courses at a Community College was helpful, because it helped me ease into my next step: reenrollment at the University I had gone to before. But this time I made some changes:

I took advantage of some of the gaps in time between classes to get involved in some clubs. I started with just one but in my second term, joined another as well. Having less spare time between classes helped me make better use of the time I did have, so I got more work done. If there was no meeting on a given day, but I had some time, I'd hang out either in a computer lab or in the cafeteria and read my textbooks or try to knock out some homework. On club meeting days, I'd go to the meeting room early and do something for a class before the meeting started. I learned that figuring out the time management thing when you don't have a lot of time to play with is easier than when you have big chunks of time.

I took a different major than I had when I was there before, more along the lines of what I took at Community College. I found the new courses related to each other and related to my end goal. I enjoyed many of the profs because they taught using their real life experiences for the course material; this gave us better insight about how the content of the text could be used in the work force. Since I had struggled with math in the past, I took some of the necessary math courses online. The advantage was that when you did your homework online, you would immediately know if you got it right; it was helpful to submit homework answers on a website and have immediate feedback about right and wrong answers. Of course wrong answers were just wrong and there was no hint as to how to fix it or what was wrong, so it took a little longer to figure it out, but I think that was the point to doing it that way. Because our professor couldn't see our work, there couldn't be partial credit or the ability to say ‘look, you dropped your negative there and that’s why it’s wrong’. I think having to go back and figure it out helped a lot come test time. I liked having immediate results and not having to wait to know what I needed to do.

I knew that this time was my first and last chance to succeed. This was calculus, and the only chance I had to take the course and pass it -- I had reached my maximum semesters of financial aid so I needed to finish in May. All of the classes I had scheduled that year were 'must pass' classes. I had no wiggle room.

Looking back at my previous awful first year experience at University, I could have avoided my mistakes by actually going to the learning center and meeting with advisers; maybe they could have helped me to understand that failing these courses wasn’t the end of the world and help me develop a new plan. I could have also gotten involved in extracurriculars right from the start and given myself a reason to stay on campus rather than wander off. A little more focus on time management would have been helpful, although I've got to say it took me a while to figure out the secret to managing time - that being having less of it to deal with.