Final Thoughts

Over my first semester here at Southern Connecticut State University I have learned a great deal about myself.  I also feel as though I have gotten a feel for what’s expected of me as a college student.  I have had to take on a lot more responsibility with getting my work done, and also keeping up with my job and family and friends. 

I think I do need to work more on prioritizing my time and not procrastinating so much on bigger assignments.  I feel as if my grades could be better if I hadn’t waited so long to start assignments, or done them as good as I could of, instead of the bare minimum requirements. 

My biggest challenge at school has been my anxiety.  I ended up missing a lot of classes because I couldn’t get myself to show up.   I assume professors think I was just slacking off and didn’t feel like coming to class, but it was more than that.  I moved home because living at school made my anxiety levels a lot higher and then when I did live home, it was easier to make the decision to stay home from a day of classes because I was so far away from school. 

I’ve tried to force myself to go to school and get my work done despite my anxiety.  I tend to look at the big picture of things rather than take it one day at a time and I think this is one of my biggest downfalls.  There were times during the semester that I thought ‘there’s no way I can do x amount more weeks of this’.  But if I tried to look at it as, ‘today all I have to do is this and this’ it makes things a lot more manageable and easy.  I also hope that reflecting back on how fast this semester went by will be a good motivation for the rest of my career at Southern Connecticut State University. 

My biggest achievement would be getting a really excellent grade in one of the classes I was worried about.  It was a class on school health education and when I walked in the first day, I realized everyone in it was much older than me.  I didn’t think I’d be able to keep up with students who have had much more experience at college than I did, but I ended up getting the highest grade of the class on our first test and a really good grade on our second test.  I was also able to put my anxiety aside and present a lesson plan to a group of older, intimidating students and do a really good job with it. 

I was able to get good grades on the exams because I did a lot of studying for that particular class.  It was a lot of random facts thrown together on each test ranging from calculating a persons ideal heart rate when exercising to knowing where most injuries happen at school.  I took notes on my own time out of our book, and rewrote them as a studying method.  I learned in high school that copying notes worked well as a study strategy for me so I liked to use it for this class. 

My time management over this semester has improved a lot than what it was at the beginning.  I’ve done less going out and more staying in and getting work done. 

I think that in the rest of my time at SCSU I want to get much better grades than I have now, especially if I want any hope of getting into the nursing program.  I plan to spend more time on my work and keep better track of my assignments to make sure everything is turned in on time and done as well as I possibly can do it! :)