OPINION: Living alone as a freshman is never as scary as it seems

Watching my brother get ready for his first semester has made me reflect on my own anxieties before my freshman year. ORACLE PHOTO/JUSTIN SEECHARAN

My little brother’s high school graduation was this month, so his attention is now fully directed to preparing for his first semester at USF in the fall.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve watched him go through the same journey I did in the summer before my freshman year, including researching on-campus dorms and collecting supplies for said dorm.

Seeing his preparations has made me reminisce about my own pre-college summer. 

I remember the slow drive to orientation, the growing pressure to make friends fueling my anxiety and the excitement of living alone suddenly transforming into real, tangible responsibilities.

Transitioning to college life is already hard enough on its own, but moving away from your family adds a whole additional layer of stress — the stress of independence.

From experience, it’s all too easy to become overwhelmed and scared in the summer before freshman year, but it never turns out as badly as your worst fears imply.

But more than anything else in my first semester, I was most scared about living alone for the first time.

Before college, I knew I had the immediate safety net of my parents and relatives if any challenges came up — something I feared would become much less accessible almost as soon as I set foot on campus.

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Trusting myself to manage my sleep schedule, adequately budget my finances and purchase and prepare my own meals to supplement my meal plan were some of my foremost concerns about those first weeks.

If you’re feeling similarly panicked about your forthcoming independence, college’s “sink-or-swim” environment is perhaps the best way to learn how to handle it. 

Even if you struggle — as I did — with time management and overspending on groceries, living independently puts you in a position where you’re required to practice and adapt far quicker than you’d expect.

And within weeks, I found I actually really enjoyed my newfound independence. Taking care of my own space at my own pace became almost therapeutic — and still is, two years later.

Living alone is far more responsibility compared to the comfort of my home, but I wouldn’t trade the independence it allows for anything. I know that being able to live alone is a skill I need to survive as an adult, and it’s one I’m glad I was required to learn.

Still, if you need additional support in transitioning to independent life, one of USF’s Counseling Center’s “top concerns” is helping first-year students manage money and independent decision making, and it offers one-on-one sessions, according to its website. 

College is a particularly great place to learn the skills required to survive as an adult because you’re expected to practice your independence in an environment where you still have an ingrained support system — such as the counselling center —   when you truly need it.

My other major concern leading up to freshman year was always making friends — which living on campus helped mitigate.

Nobody I knew from high school went to USF, so I was essentially starting entirely fresh.

My fears were only compounded when I came out of the multi-hour orientation without really having connected with any of the students I sat with.

But whatever worries I had quickly subsided within days of the semester starting. My fellow dormmates hosted introductory communal game and movie nights, and I soon bonded with many students there.

Living on campus has also acted as an instant icebreaker. 

Most of my first-year friends came from those introductory nights — we were all freshmen, unsure and uncomfortable at the start of our college journey, living on the same floor of the same building and looking for people to connect with.

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What I realized is that most freshmen are as nervous and as eager to make friends as you are. I can’t pretend it isn’t scary to take the first step to talk to new people, but I‘ve learned the other party is almost always receptive when you do.

So no matter how scary making friends in the new world of college may seem at first, if you show effort and put yourself out there, you’ll soon realize that any nerves you may have are sorely overblown.

Yet as I type these words, I fear they ring hollow. I know far too well that platitudes about everything working out often do very little to mitigate the all-encompassing fear that nothing will.

I think the best advice I can give, then, is a quote from Mary Shelley’s 1981 novel Frankenstein, which I first read toward the end of high school and later had to study in one of my literature courses at USF.

“You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings,” Shelley wrote.

Even if you head towards your first semester feeling nothing but dread — and finding no advice will make it seem more manageable — by the time it actually begins, you’ll realize it came with far less failure than you’d expected. 

The weeks before college are the hardest part. Hopefully, that’s enough to get through the wait.