What if I Don't Fit in at College?
Are you worried you’ll be saying “I don’t belong at my college” in a matter of weeks? As you prepare for your freshman year of college, you may come to some wrong assumptions. You may start to doubt yourself—your personality, your skills, etc. Don’t.
This new stage of life can cause you to question who you are. You might start feeling like you’re weird, abnormal, or a misfit. While you don’t really feel like you fit in with your high school friends anymore, you also don’t feel like a college student yet.
Hearing “you’re normal” might be the comforting thing to hear right now, but it isn’t probably the most helpful thing for you to hear right now. The truth is you’re not normal, but that’s ok. No one is “normal.”
One of the biggest things you’ll learn in the next few years is that people are multifaceted. They are not merely one thing or another (e.g. kind or mean). Rather, people are somewhere on a spectrum.
During my freshman year I met many people that I didn’t understand. These people seemed odd, hard to read, and difficult to categorize. As the years passed and I got to know these people more, I realized that these people were trying to figure themselves out (just like I was).
People are complex. They may be hard to figure out. You probably are too, but don’t feel pressure to reinvent yourself in this time of transition. You don’t need to be normal or become normal. You need to learn who you truly are and accept yourself, flaws and all.
You certainly will find areas in which you want to grow or improve. (You likely already have some areas you’d like to work on.) However, you need to become comfortable in your own skin.
How can you use the summer before freshman year to prepare for college? Learn to accept and acknowledge who you are in the following ways.
Think about you and others kindly.
You likely feel in between a child and an adult, and it’s awkward. This quasi-adulthood can cause you to feel insecure about yourself. You may start to jump to assumptions about what others think of you.
Rather than assuming people hate you or reject you, accept that others are likely thinking much less about you than they are thinking about themselves. (Human nature lends people to thinking more about self than others.)
Refuse to project your insecurities on others’ interactions with you. You may feel out-of-place, awkward, and/or nervous. Others likely take little to no notice of your insecurity.
Being comfortable in a new phase of life or a new place takes lots of practice. If you’re feeling insecure, use these feelings to help you empathize with other people rather than to doubt yourself.
Be aware of how others perceive you.
Reading other people’s minds (especially a stranger’s mind) is virtually impossible. You can never really know what someone is thinking, unless that person tells you. However, you can develop the ability to interpret others’ words, gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc.
The ability to assess and adapt to others’ nonverbals (gestures, body language, etc.) ties into an important skill—emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence includes many components, but one of these components is self-awareness.
Self-awareness is a fairly self-explanatory concept. It is the idea of being conscious of how you come across to others. This may sound like a no-brainer skill, but it takes work to develop.
Choose to start working on developing this skill during this summer. You can do this in a few simple ways:
Ask a coworker or recently-made friend what their first impressions were of you. This gives you an idea of how others see you. Carefully listen to each person’s input without making objections, but also be aware that their impressions may be off. Asking multiple people will give you a more accurate picture of what your first impression is like.
Pay special attention to others’ reactions to your words. When you talk to people at work or somewhere outside the home, pay special attention to how they react to you. If they react by avoiding eye contact or try to quickly exit the conversation, this tells you something important. You are making others feel uncomfortable, unwelcome, or some other negative emotion.
There are certainly other ways you can develop some self-awareness but these ideas give you a start.
The way others’ perceive you is important, but in the end you can only control yourself. You cannot control others. However, you can do much to shape how others see you (keep reading).
Develop discernment on how to adapt to different social situations.
One of the most “freshman” things you can do at college is to ignore social norms. College has its own culture. Adjusting to this new culture takes time (usually at least a few months).
As an incoming college freshman, you can start developing the skill of social-awareness (another component of emotional intelligence). Social awareness is the idea of perceiving and adapting to the norms of different situations and peoples.
Because college is likely filled with a much broader group of people than your high school was, the normal and acceptable behavior of college will look different than high school did.
How can you use this summer to prepare for this reality?
Choose to watch and listen. You can easily make yourself look pretty foolish at the start of college. Instead of jumping in and blurting out something, take some time to observe. How do college upperclassmen interact with each other? (Where do they sit? How do they approach one another?) Taking mental notes of these things can help you look less like a lost freshman.
Accept you will have awkward moments. You will say something embarrassing, come across weirdly, or do something else you may regret. This is just part of adjusting to a new setting. Know these moments will happen, and don’t let these times keep you from trying.
Ask questions. When in doubt, ask. If you don’t know how to connect with your college roommate, how to send an email to your professor, where to sit in the dining hall, etc., simply ask. Most upperclassmen can remember what it was like to be a freshman and are willing to give some advice when asked nicely.
You’re not really normal, but that’s ok. There is no real normal. Starting this new adventure of college will be a stretching time, a time where you’re tempted to doubt yourself or reinvent yourself. Don’t stress. Anything worthwhile (including becoming a college student) takes time to figure out.
