Isis with OSU gearThis month’s author, Isis Williams, is a 2015 Outstanding Student. Overcoming many obstacles, Isis graduated from Aiken New Tech this spring, and this fall, she entered her freshman year at The Ohio State University as a Biology/Pre-Med major.  Isis has tremendous strength and tenacity, and we appreciate her perspective of entering college and being “one of more than forty thousand.”

As a student in a new school, you always get first day jitters. In fact, when you’re new to anything, you get butterflies, and it feels like your heart won’t ever slow back down to its regular pace. This is what I felt for the entire month of August before attending The Ohio State University. I was always on an adrenaline high because there are over 40,000 people on its campus at any given moment, and I was coming from a place where I was one in sixty. I was coming from a place where I had a one in sixty chance of being heard. I was coming from a place where there was a one in sixty chance of me being recognized. I was coming from that place and moving to a place where I was one in more than forty thousand bright individuals who were also the cream of the crop. No one can tell you how to start your first year in a place like that in any other words than to just be yourself and to always remember that these people are all just like you: the cream of their crop, trying to find their way to the top.

So, as you brave that crowd of people on the first day, leaving your dorm room knowing where your first class is, or having a general idea of which direction you should head and a few extra minutes for ‘sight seeing’, will go a long way. Having too little to do is too often an issue of our generation. The vast number of things to do on a campus so large will ensure you’ll have somewhere to be in every minute of everyday, once you get your study schedule laid out. You’ll learn that some lines are worth standing in and that most aren’t. You’ll learn that there is always a group of people to hang out with and that there’s always somewhere to be alone. These are things that you’ll hear throughout your senior year, and you won’t listen to them.  But, once you get there, you’ll find yourself in that exact situation and you’ll, of course, feel like you made, whatever your decision happens to be, a completely original idea.

Long story short, college is an adventure from the beginning. You get out of it exacty what you put into it. The t-shirt/credit card scam affects millions of lives every year. Just know that you have a support system rooting from your high school teachers, CYC and some of your friends.

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Have a story to share? Contact Kate Elliott to discuss contributing to the CYC blog: kelliott@cycyouth.org | 513.363.5251