http://freshmanyearredo.wordpress.com Collegiate Advice for Freshmen Guys Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:53:34 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.png http://freshmanyearredo.wordpress.com http://freshmanyearredo.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/from-john-egan/ http://freshmanyearredo.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/from-john-egan/#comments Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:53:34 +0000 tnilan http://freshmanyearredo.wordpress.com/?p=79 Continue reading →]]>

Be still: It is important that you sit still in silence and reflect at least a couple of times a week.  You could intentionally set this time aside for yourself.  College is overloaded with stimulus and things to do. Furthermore, even when you are doing nothing you are doing something.  Whether it be watching television, messing with the computer, playing video games or doing whatever else it is you do with your down time. You will find that many of your peers live and act without a single thought.  Consciously think and then do.

Practice Selflessness (Philippians 2:4): It would be a challenge to find an environment more conducive to selfishness than college.  Later in life when you have a job you do work for such and such company.  However, in college, all the work you do is for the betterment of yourself.  Many of the stereotypical college activities are in themselves selfish.  Make a habit of doing good for others.  Start by just helping anyone who asks for help.  Then move to just doing things out of the pleasure of forgetting self.

Ignore stereotypical college statements:  We’re in college! We will just grow out of that stuff (it’s sad but I’ve seen people doing blow and this was there justification).  We’re young.  Live a little.  I’ll just get back to God after college.  It’s your 21st birthday so go crazy.  Stick to what you know to be true in your heart.

Drinking:  You may have already started drinking or you plan on drinking when you come to college.  I will not tell you what decision to make.  It is your decision. I personally began drinking at an age that was much to early.  It is important that you understand that you are still responsible for your actions if you are drinking.  Understand that if you decide to drink under age you are taking a risk.  An MIP is a painful ordeal to deal with.  If you choose to drink underage you must be very cautious.  You must take calculated risks.  Do not take shots.   Even if people are shoving them in your face.  Stay with beer and your chances of getting in trouble with the law are less.  I personally will not exceed 3 beverages a night.  If you are ever bringing your character into question than you are drinking too much.

Goals/Priorities: Set goals and priorities before every semester.  Print it out and put it on your wall.

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Earnestly seek Christ with a passionate heart. Who you are and what you want to do will follow.

Constantly invest and build relationships. This is really the only time that you will be surrounded by a multitude of different kinds of people. These relationships too will hopefully continue after college and be a blessing over your life.

Try and stay out of you dorm room as much as possible. Its easy to sit on the couch and waste your life inside the dorm.  Be active. Be involved. It will definitely pay off.

Don’t judge other people. Some of my closest friends are the ones I completely couldn’t stand at first.

Serve strangers.

As hard as it may be, focus on school work. That’s a large part of the reason you’re there. Study what you love.

Run. I hated running. Its a great escape now.

Take time to be alone

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Do your best to stay at school for at least a month after you move in before visiting home.

Focus on a few important high school relationships and do your best to maintain them every week or 2. It is pretty tough to stay great friends and talk everyday to every high school friend.

Find a good place to study outside of your dorm room.

Time management is crucial – get an agenda or use a calender in your phone to schedule time for everything.

Get your feet wet with different campus ministries, churches, and campus organizations in order to see which one fits the best.

Get off the futon – do your best not to sit in the dorms all day before/after classes.

Keep an ongoing resume that you can update anytime, you never know when you’ll need it.

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Reassess your goals/priorities regularly- The things you value as a freshman won’t always be as important to you. You’ll be constantly changing in college. So every semester or year reevaluate what your priorities are and set your goals accordingly.

Know who your “base” is – College can be one of the best times in life to build relationships with all different types of people and if you don’t get to know people different than you you’re wasting one of college’s best opportunities. But always keep a couple relationships above the rest- the ones with people who know you best and will help you accountable either directly or indirectly. Without these people you will be swayed back and forth throughout your college years in all sorts of ways.

Take advantage of the freedom that college offers – You will never be so free in all your life. You have basically no one to answer to or that keeps up with you to the hour. But you also have the ability to do what you want to do and go where you want to go. Don’t abuse the freedom, but certainly don’t let it go to waste. Just go places, do fun stuff, sleep at off times, eat cheap for a week so you can go on a nice date, and enjoy the little parts of life that are so unique to college.

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College is real life. I had people all around me acting as if college was a stage of life where all morals were put on hold until the “real world”. A lot of people around you can/will get caught up in the lie that college is just one big party where there are no repercussions for their actions. The decisions you make wherever you go in life will follow you and form habits. Be cautious of compromising your morals because “you’re in college.”

The company you keep will dictate what you will become. I have seen many people get caught up in the wrong group of guys. In the middle of every semester, stop everything you are doing and think about all the people you hang out. Ask yourself: Are these people helping me into what I want to become? Are my friends influencing me to become better or worse?

Find a group of guys to attend church every Sunday and campus ministries during the first two months of school. The reason I say “for the first couple of months” is so you develop a routine.  If you don’t like the church or ministry, change. Also, it’s easier to do this when you PLAN to go to bed earlier on Saturday nights.

Guys are 100x more fun to hang out with than girls.

Go to www.mint.com right now. This will help you track your expenses throughout college and put what you spend in perspective. It’s free.

Go to as many away football games as possible. Call your high school friends at other colleges and tell them, “I’m staying with you, no challenge.”

Everyone seems to be a “good person” in college. This is one of my theories. The bars, fraternities, sororities, etc. are filled with people who “are going to heaven because they are good people” (I quote that because I’ve heard it many times). When I first went to college, my faith in Christ was defined by attending church and praying when something bad happened. Other than that, I was a typical “good guy”.  There’s a difference between having a “good guy” faith and being a follower of Christ. It took me 3 years to realize this.

Get off your futon. Limit yourself to an hour a day on your futon alone. Your freshman year can be awesome if you do this. If you want to watch TV/play video games/watch movies, invite a friend over to accompany you. I played way too much Halo 2 instead of doing cooler things… Dorm life is so much fun because there are so many people around you. Don’t waste time alone… do it with someone!

During the college football season, go on ESPN and do College Pick ‘Em with your friends. Believe me, it’s awesome.

Things that have stolen hours of my life that I want back: Facebook, ESPN.com, Halo 2 (or any video game I played by myself), TV I watched alone, the Internet in general.

You should always have goals. Write down a couple of things you want to do before you graduate or a couple of things you want to accomplish each semester. Give your goals to someone (like family or best friend). Ask them specifically to remind you about them on certain dates. Goal setting is fun. Take the goals you make and tape them to your laptop.

How to be stressed or have anxiety: Define yourself by your grades, major, fraternity, possessions, family background, clothes, ability to make people laugh, amount of friends, girls you hang out with, summer activities, experiences, etc. The things that defines you is that you belong to God. Remind  yourself each day that God loves you, and you don’t have to earn that love. God love each of us in a magnificent way. The more you remind yourself of this, the more comfort you may have.

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Make decisions about who you are and who you want to be before you have to.

Lay a foundation for what you believe. Christ is that foundation. (1 Peter 2:4-8)

Spiritual growth/change is a process (Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed) - stick to the process of spending time with the Lord and in community with friends and other believers.

Find a community of friends and other believers on whom you can rely. Be intentional with each other in prayer, worship, encouragement, and in conversation. (Hebrews 10)

Take classes that you want to take – not just the easy classes to get by.

Spend more time with guys instead of girls (your friendship with guys will last a lot longer).

Find a mentor who is a year or two older than you in college (As Paul was for Timothy).

Mentor someone who is a year or two younger than you (As Timothy was for Paul).

Befriend professors.

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• Other people’s opinion of you do not alter the reality of who you are.  Ex.  Someone can think you are gay because of the car you drive but does that make you gay?  No.  You are who you are and it matters only how God sees you (ps, He loves you unconditionally…you don’t have to earn His affection).  So…do not worry so much about impressing others or putting up a certain image or acting certain ways to please other people.  Focus on honoring and pleasing God.  This is not just a good thing to do, it is liberating to begin to worry and care less about impressing other people.
• Take time to be by yourself.  It can be tempting in college to always be around other people – 32,000 students in a 2 square mile block – but I have learned that at least for me, I need to have the proper amount of alone time, time with just me and God, in order to truly be present when I am with other people.  Also, if we’re constantly surrounded by other people, then we can become uncomfortable with when we are alone.  It seems a great and high thing to be content whether surrounded with people and activity or just alone somewhere.  Check out the State Botanical Gardens for help with this. (UGA specific)
  
• With that said, enjoy meeting massive amounts of people and don’t worry too much about keeping up with everyone at first.  Your first year in college is a rare time when you get to meet literally hundreds of people whom you did not even know they existed.  Also, try to be open-minded about the people you meet, not writing them off because of their age, how they dress or talk or look, or who they hang out with.  This too can be liberating and fun.
• Pray a lot and read the Bible a lot.  It is our guidebook through college.

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Start finding a healthy balance early.  My freshman year, I jumped from working all the time to exercising all the time to drinking all the time to sleeping all the time and back again constantly.  Every day (or at least every week) should have time to see friends, stay in shape, stick with school work and take care of your body.  Any good activity is bad in immoderate amounts.

Don’t be afraid to be yourself early.  I know this is cliche, but there’s a reality to it: there are 30,000 people or more at large schools.  Even if only 1% loves who you really are, you’ll still have 300 friends.  College is the time to explore who YOU want to be, so don’t hold back and try to be “cool.”  Buy a moped.  Go play D+D.  Draw comics.

Allow yourself to be seduced by new ideas and activities.  The number of clubs and causes active on a university campus is astounding.  You can
study a martial art, learn to ballroom dance, feed the homeless, protest genocide in Africa, raise money for cancer research, etc, etc, etc, pretty much all at a minimum cost to yourself.  Take advantage of the resources around you and you might just find a lifelong passion.

Develop a personal relationship with at least one professor your first semester, preferably in the class that interests you most.  Generally, professors love talking to students.  It’s why they teach.  So think up a couple of questions from class and go to office hours.  Ask the professor what they’re currently working on.  Being friends with your professor has some obvious, academic benefits: good letters of recommendation, opportunities to do research and better grades are just a few.  I can honestly say, however, that I’ve benefited far more from the mentorship of my “older friends” then from any boost to my resume.  These guys have been around the block and are more than willing to give you some good advice.

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Find a good college ministry (RUF, Wesley, Baptist Campus Ministry, Crossroads) and get in a small group. This will allow you to A) make A LOT of new friends in the large group meetings and B) make close friends with a few Christian brothers or sisters in the small group that you can rely on for accountability, encouragement, and someone to just hang out with.

Look for an area to serve. Things like Habitat for Humanity, Dance Marathon, any service projects, the downtown Athens homeless ministry. This might be where you meet your best friends in college and where you experience the most growth as a Christian.

When you live in the dorm, see it as an opportunity to live as Christ commands us to live: with joy and love. patience and kindness. Don’t think you have to share the gospel with as many people as possible. That may come. or it may not. Simply see it as a great opportunity to LIVE the gospel and its effects on your life in front of hundreds of guys and girls your age who need the gospel.

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Internships, internships, internships–a class in your major doesn’t give you the best insight into what the “real” job is.

Ask the tough questions before you get to college: Where do I stand on drinking? Who do I want to be when I graduate from college? Do I want to do a fraternity?

Find a church as quickly as possible!

The people you surround yourself will dictate what college is like: find like minded friends who share similar values, find a mentor.

Twilight- amazing bike race! (UGA specific)

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