As a first-year, you put yourself under a lot of pressure. Your family and your friends might do the same without realizing too, and it’s normal. It’s normal to feel pressure from what’s coming since you don’t exactly know what it is.
We’ve compiled these principles and advice for all our first-year student readers so that they can have some motivation, strength, and lucidity about what might come.
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Moving on, here are our tips and advice:
Accepting Responsibility
An important principle to remember, not just for school but for the rest of your life, is to grasp the fact that you are responsible for what happens to you. Many people, not just students, fall victim to a “victim mindset.”
They believe that they have no control over what happens to them in their lives. They blame external circumstances or other people for everything wrong that comes their way, failing to realize their negative mindset and inability to accept that it’s their fault that negative events happen in their life.
This is an extremely powerless and hopeless state of mind to adapt. It needs to be changed right away if a student wants to build a fulfilling life for themselves or if they simply just want to make peace with themselves.
That’s why it’s important to remember, before everything else, that:
- You are responsible for your destiny and future.
- All of your actions have consequences.
- Most of what happens to you is a direct result of your thoughts and emotions. If you push blame on other people and adopt a consistently negative outlook, you’ll get just that.
These are solid principles that students should try to understand when pushing forward in their lives and their academic lives. It will let them nurture a more mature and healthy mindset. Many students might lack the self-awareness to realize this earlier on, but that’s why we’re sharing this.
Take More Responsibility
Be Proactive In Classes
You will learn quicker, understand easier, and pass easier if you learn to be proactive in class. This means you have to train yourself to be in the moment and participate in the classes that you’ve chosen. Fall in love with the learning process, and you’ll enjoy your journey.
If you find it impossible to focus and feel like your courses are draining you, then there’s a real possibility that you’re in the wrong major. You might not like what you’re doing and instead are just doing it to do something.
In this case, it’s your responsibility to either change to a major that you enjoy or to keep at it even if you don’t enjoy it. Learn to take action for yourself without making excuses or prolonging it. Align with your reasons and see which path to take is fit.
In any case, being proactive in class instead of simply waiting for class to end is a good way to learn the topics easier without having to memorize them over and over again. And what’s the point of doing things unmotivated? Realize that your attitude counts a lot.
Engage With Your Professor
Your professor is there for a reason. They’re not your enemy. Professors can be challenging at times, but you should never hesitate to ask what you have to ask and discuss important matters with them.
Simultaneously, you are learning to build your trust and your communication skills when you freely speak with a role figure about what matters. And there are a lot of advantages when you speak with a professor.
You can clear up any confusions you might have in class, get valuable insight into your progress, and the professor will see that you’re motivated to learn. They like that. So take responsibility for your education, and strike up a conversation with them when you need to.
Believing in Yourself
Accepting responsibility is the first step, but you’ll need more than that to maintain your drive, your confidence, and your will to follow through. If you engage too much in negative self-talk and are too harsh on yourself, you’ll become very miserable over time.
Some people might never show this, but it doesn’t mean it’s not there. There’s nothing wrong with challenging yourself to grow. Sometimes we’re better off being harder on ourselves to succeed at an especially challenging feat.
But we shouldn’t let ourselves get used to harsh self-talk in the long run. It’s healthier too:
- Make self-love the motivation behind our actions instead of self-hate.
- Have positive and encouraging self-talk rather than self-critique.
- When times are super hard, it’s easier to negotiate with yourself than it is to deprive yourself of things.
- Accept that pain and obstacles have a lesson in them, no matter how bad they are.
- Accept rejection and failure as stepping stones instead of thinking of them as the end and then giving up.
Believing in yourself doesn’t mean striving for perfection and being consistently harsh on yourself. Balance your self-talk. Be strict with yourself when you have to be, but be loving and kind to yourself when you have to be as well. Grow from a positive place.
Final Thoughts
We hope you’ve learned something new and valuable from our article. It wasn’t written to scare our readers off but to give them lucid advice on how to move forward with a lighter heart. We hope this has helped somehow, and we know how important it is to process these types of advice at your own pace, so do that.
There’s nothing wrong with not realizing a few things in the past. That’s why the future is so much more meaningful when values, principles, and purpose are factored into our decisions. Good luck.
