The summer between your senior year of high school and freshman year of college is accompanied by a unique feeling: something familiar is ending, and you only have a very faint idea of what comes next. Your education will no longer be defined by other people. Up to this point, adults have decided your class schedule, telling you when to eat lunch, when to go to the bathroom and when to go home. Leaving that rigidity behind is both exciting and frightening. You’re the adult now — no one calls your parents if you don’t show up to lecture.
Nonetheless, your parents, grandparents, distant relatives and neighbors are probably bombarding you with advice right now. If you’re experiencing anything like I was, you’re hearing something like “College is a great time to challenge yourself” or “Take hard classes to expand your horizons.” Neither point is entirely wrong, but they aren’t entirely right either. College is a great time to challenge yourself and you should expand your horizons, but most of the people telling you this are exclusively referring to academics.
That’s where these self-appointed sages miss the mark. You’re coming to a big school for a reason. Plenty of smaller liberal arts colleges offer enriching, rigorous classes, but they don’t offer the University of Michigan’s more than 1,600 student organizations. You have a cornucopia of extracurricular options before you. Take advantage of this opportunity, even if that means taking a lighter course load in the beginning. Chosen wisely, the clubs you participate in can prove even more valuable than your courses.
Maybe you’re interested in journalism, like me. Although the University doesn’t have a journalism school, it does have the fifth most visited student publication in the country. My time writing and editing columns for The Michigan Daily has taught me to think more critically and express myself more eloquently than any of my English classes have. Alternatively, you might be interested in public speaking. Preparing and performing jokes on stage with the Amateur Hour stand up comedy club has taught me more about public speaking than any communications course ever could. And, it’s a blast.
The best part is that you can learn in a low-stakes environment. Falling behind in a class can devestate your GPA, but falling behind in a club doesn’t have the same dire consequences. If you need to step back for a week or two, you usually can. Even The Daily, which has higher professional standards than most student organizations, often showed me more forgiveness and understanding with deadlines than my professors when I first started here.
My clubs turned me into who I am today, and I’m eternally grateful. I’ve learned, made friends and even landed professional opportunities because of them. But they take effort and time — time you won’t have if you overburden yourself with academics. The fall of your freshman year will be busy. You’ll move into your dorm in late August and, from then until winter break, there will be a blitz of meeting new people, establishing relationships and, of course, joining clubs. This is the most rapid period of personal growth and development you’ll experience in all of college. Don’t stunt it with an injection of 18 credits and a weeder class.
Let me give you a tip one my older brother gave to me when I was building my first schedule here two years ago. Visit the Atlas Course Guide, enter the classes you’re considering taking into the search bar and look at the median grade. If it’s not an “A,” try to avoid that course. You don’t always have a choice — some majors or departments are more difficult than others — but do your best to make this part of your life easy. You likely can put off Calculus until you’re better established on campus.
College is a balancing act. Academics, extracurriculars and relationships are all highly important, and choosing how you want to spend your time on each can prove challenging. You may even feel you need to sacrifice one to have the others, but you don’t. You can have all three, so long as you don’t let any one thing become too demanding. So if you see your class schedule balloon into something unmanageable, or you worry it will distract you from other priorities, don’t let other people talk you out of dropping classes. Remember, you’re the adult now.
Use that freedom to check out every mass meeting you can. Join clubs like The Daily, Amateur Hour or whatever appeals to you. They don’t come at the expense of challenging yourself and expanding your horizons – they’re necessary parts of that process.
Summer Editorial Page Editor Jack Brady can be reached at jackrbra@umich.edu
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