Did you change over the course of your freshman year? And how (if at all) do you think you will change over the course of your sophomore year?
If you saw the assortment of sticky notes I brought to college, you would mostly likely describe me as somewhere between charmingly methodical and compulsively psychotic, depending of course on your appreciation for these seemingly simple self-sticking slips of colored paper. 3x3s, 4x4s, skinny tabs, fat tabs, in pastel pink, baby blue, lined, unlined…the list could go on and on. I started off freshman year finally claiming a long-awaited sense of independence, and my diverse collection of Post-Its was just one example of my eager desire to start finally being totally, flawlessly in control of my life.
And that’s when, well, things started to get sticky.
Obviously I loved being independent. I felt wildly accomplished after washing, drying, and folding my laundry. I would get a crazy rush after placing an Amazon order for colored leggings, without asking anyone whether I should buy the charcoal gray pair instead of the forest green. And there was something indescribably thrilling about being able to grab some friends and just hop on a train to New York for the day. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine being happier. But being on my own in college also made it way too easy for me to start taking my own control a little too seriously. After all, they say power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It only took a couple weeks of living with this newfound power over my life for me to start thinking that I was the only person who knew exactly what was best for me. And subconsciously, I had decided that it would be best for me to be flawless.
Bad idea.
The more I tried to make things perfect, the more they started to fall apart. I was trying to convince my classmates that I was dedicated to my studies, prove to my peers that I knew how to have a good time, while still assuring my closest friends, and myself, that I was happy. Pretty soon, I was five different people at five different times, trying to embody what I believed was the “perfect person” in each of the facets of my new, independent life. There was even a really scary period when I was making some pretty serious decisions based on what I thought just one specific person expected of me. College wasn’t about being in control of my life anymore; it was about trying to be in control of perfection. I didn’t know it, but I was letting my entire independent spirit slip right through my fingers, into the hands of others, and it would take over a semester to get it back.
I came pretty close to losing my sense of what I wanted to accomplish here at TCNJ. After all, I brought so many sticky notes to school not because they would make me flawless; I brought them because I always wanted to keep my eyes on my goals to which I had so fervently committed myself. Goals related to academics, my career, understanding people, cultures, the world…goals that really have nothing to do with flawlessness or perfection at all!
I’d like to see myself never letting my independence slip through my fingers again, and I hope to spend sophomore year with the people who appreciate me and help me stay committed to my ambitions. It took some really incredibly friends to help me grasp that being perfect isn’t about being flawless. It’s about being aware of your strengths, your flaws, then accepting yourself as your work towards your goals. I know that if I spend sophomore year being 100% me, 100% of the time, as opposed to being 20% me, 20% of the time — ugh wait this sounds like a bad math problem. This is the other main issue: I want to stop being so calculative and preoccupied with planning out the details of my future, and focus on enjoying life, one day at a time. I’ve always been an advocate of being prepared, but I seriously need to stop doing things like assigning percent values to abstract anticipating how far along in my professional education I’ll be when my hair starts turning gray, or hoarding plastic bags in my dorm room because “you never know when you need one.” No one will ever need sixteen empty Forever21 bags at a time, like, EVER.
And I downloaded this new app for my phone that I want to start using.
It’s called Sticky Notes.
Asmi is currently a sophomore biology major in the 7 year medical program. When she isn’t in awe of the marvels of the human body, you can usually find her fawning over Ikea apartment decor. Her favorite color is any and every variation of pink, and she has a (slightly unhealthy) obsession with floral patterns. She also loves maps, despite her weak sense of aerial direction, and hopes to visit each continent — four down, three to go — before Campus Town construction is complete!
The Sophomore Year Experience at TCNJ 