| 16 min. read |

A formal write-up on this topic is long overdue for me. I graduated from college three years ago and often find myself reflecting on my college years. What would I have done differently? Would I go to the same school if I could do it all over? What wouldn’t I change?

Before I get into all the deets, let me clarify that I am extremely grateful and proud of myself for earning a Bachelor’s degree in Materials Science and Engineering from a prestigious school. To this day, I consider it to be my proudest accomplishment, but I tend to ask myself, “at what cost?”

I left college with a few tangible things like my degree, future husband, a few awards, and an abundance of college apparel, however the knowledge I gained is immeasurable.

I could go on and on about each painful lesson I learned, but for now I will stick to the most important ones.

1. College may not be the best 4 years of your life, in fact it can be the worst 

College was perhaps the worst four years of my life, yet somehow it is filled with many of the best moments of my life. My first reality check came with my first exam, which highlighted that my academics were not up to snuff for the rigor of my program.

I say this next sentence not to gloat, but to emphasize the importance of knowing which college/university you have selected to attend.

I finished high school in the top 20ish of my class out of about 500 students. At the time, I was super proud of this and thought I was one smart cookie. My first college exam taught me the exact opposite. In fact, after leaving the exam, I distinctly remember looking to my friend and saying, “What the h*ll was that?!?” To make matters worse, they looked back at me and said, “Yeah, I thought the exam was going to be way harder than that.” Internally, I was sh*tting a brick. Externally, I played it cool and pretended I felt the same way.

It goes without saying that this newfound friend of mine was not my friend for long. Once they realized I was not academically at their level, they chose to study and complete homework with other students who probably brought more to the study group than questions and blank stares.

So I got my first exam grade back and received my first ever failing grade. As I was looking at my exam, I remember thinking, “Okay, I wonder what the average was? Maybe everyone else did badly too.” As I am trying to affirm myself that everything is probably fine and I will get it on the next one, the professor puts the grades up on the screen in a bar graph that notes how many people scored an A, B, C, D, etc. My affirmative thoughts quickly turned into “I do not belong here” as I looked at the graph displaying the average grade to be a C with many people scoring A’s and B’s.

If I close my eyes and think hard enough, I can honestly still see the bar graph behind the professor as he began commencing his “welcome to college” speech and emphasizing that if your score is below the average (spoiler alert, mine was), then our high school studying tactics are likely not going to suffice for this class or the rest of your time here.

2. Understand what type of school you are choosing!

The university I attended had a well-known engineering program, but it was also well-known for being one of the top party schools. Have I mentioned yet that I was also a part of the track and field team?

As you could imagine, the distraction of partying colleagues, academics, and Division I athletics don’t necessarily mix well. Quickly, I realized that my only social options were to go out or stay in my dorm and study. I was not a kid who drank in high school and was not ready to start drinking when I got to school. However, this activity was a popular pick among many students.

Early on in my freshman year, a student at our rivalry school lost their life due to alcohol poisoning. This caused a campus-wide crackdown on partying. While I was well aware of the increased cop budget to bust parties, I was sitting in my dorm on a Friday night alone and bored while everyone else was out. Naturally the track team was a throwing a party, and in an effort to make friends. I decided I would swing by for a little bit and headed down with a bottle of water since we had practice the next day. Upon entering the house, I went downstairs and spent some time socializing with the upperclassmen I had yet to meet, but our conversations were quickly broken up by frantic shouts that the cops showed up.

They blocked all the exits of the house ensuring one could leave without being identified and rushed us upstairs and out of the basement. I was scared at first as the cops were searching for the “owner” of the house, although they were all renters and owned nothing. The “owner” had yet to present himself, and the cops started taunting him by saying, “Oh John, come out come out wherever you are.” At this point, although I am dead sober, I am very scared. After they realize John is not at the house, they tell us we can leave, but they need to scan our student IDs so they can report us to the Dean. At that moment, I was not smart enough to tell them I didn’t have my ID or claim I was from another school, so I handed over my school ID to which they took a picture. That Monday, I got an email from the Dean to come to her office.

As I am sitting across from the Dean of academics, I am asked at least 5 times if I was drinking and highly encouraged not to lie. In spite of the fact that I was in a house full of people well into a night of drinking, I truly had not been drinking, so I stuck to my story. To this day, I do not think she was buying it, but that was my truth and I stuck to it. It was incredibly frustrating that to me, that while I was abiding by laws there was still an effort by the school to reprimand me. It conveyed the message that I will get in trouble even if I am not doing anything illegal.

The rest of my time at school was honestly spent trying to socialize in safe way, studying, or training. Those were my only three options at this school, and that is what I wish I knew before going there. While it was fun to be out, I would have preferred if the school had more to offer than nightlife. Thinking back on it, I am lucky I even had the track team, it took all other hours of my time except for Saturday nights, or else there would have really been nothing to do but study and party.

So when I say I understand the school you are choosing, I am not referring to the major; I am instead referring to the culture and activities available to you on campus. If you want to party your heart out and be in a sorority/fraternity, then I would recommend this school. But if you are hoping to spend your time doing other activities, then I would take it into serious consideration what the school has to offer beyond the classroom.

Another fact that I knew about the school, but did not take into consideration, was that it used to be an all-male school. While I thought this wouldn’t impact me, it certainly did when I was completing my degree. To put it simply, it was easy to tell that there were still some professors that believed the school should be strictly male.

3. Advocate for yourself 

As a person of color at a predominantly white institution, I faced additional challenges. I actually did not start as a Materials Science and Engineering major. My initial dream was to become a chemical engineer. Unfortunately, once I got into my ChemE classes, there was an even bigger reality check with my test scores.

I took my first ChemE exam in the fall of my sophomore year. I was not able to finish the exam, but upon speaking to my classmates, neither were they, so this made me feel a lot better than my experience with my first exam.

We got our scores back the next week and I see that I scored an 11%. Yes, 11%, with the average being 29%.

Saying it back, it honestly should be against the code of conduct for a professor to write an exam with an average that low, but there were bigger fish to fry with this particular professor.

As he was going over the exam, I started to notice that he marked answers on my exam as wrong, although they matched the answers he was sharing on his test key. When I approached him at the end of class to let him know there was a miscalculation in my grade, he informed me that I would need to come to his office during office hours to have the exam corrected.

This is a good opportunity to let you know that his office was on a separate campus that required catching a bus, and the bus to get to that campus only ran every 30 minutes. Anyways, I made the trek to his office before practice, and I give him my exam, and he gives me 20 points back! How does a professor miss 20 points?

I thought this was very odd, but tried not to dwell on it. Our next exam comes around and it is the same thing again. Another misgraded paper. At this point, I am feeling like this is on purpose, so I go to his office again and give him my exam. This time he is not as nice and says that my work was not displayed clearly and only gives me a few points back, encouraging me to show my work more clearly next time. He then starts to say that my work shows I lack a basic understanding of the high school curriculum and that sometimes people get into this school who do not come from a good enough background. Letting the shock of his statement sink in I begin to realize that maybe this professor is a bit prejudice, so I go straight to the dean of chemical engineering to discuss what this professor has said to me. Instead of the ChemE dean affirming me, he doubles down and tells me that people of my background do not belong in this major.

Needless to say, I did not pass the ChemE class because I “failed” the final. Hard to say if I actually failed it though since the final exam is not returned to the student and instead just the final grade for the class, but I needed a C+ of higher to pass the class. This was the first time I had ever experience blatant discrimination and had yet to learn how to fight these types of battles. So I took the failed class and switched majors.

I ended up carrying this experience with me until I graduated. I didn’t tell anyone about it, not even my parents. I was too scared to say anything to my friends, parents, or boyfriend because maybe the professor was right and I just wasn’t smart enough for this major. 

I regret not advocating for myself in that moment, but fortunately there were plenty more opportunities ahead of me where I would have the opportunity to advocate for myself 🤪.

4. Friends aren’t forever, and that’s okay!

You start college at age 17 or 18 not knowing what the next 4 years will hold and barely knowing yourself. Yet you picked out your career path for the rest of your life and are living away from home (a.ka. you support system) for the first time.

College is unique in that you are on a campus SURROUNDED by hundreds and thousands of people, yet you can be so lonely. Being on the track team limited my ability to make and maintain friends out side of athletics due to our demanding schedules, making it easy to feel isolated.

Over the course of 4 years you expect to make some life long friends. Well, I am sad to admit that I left college with one friend, and now, after being out for three years, that friend and I do not keep in touch.

This was a challenging reality to accept because my best friend was everything to me at that time. She made me feel seen; we understood each other’s hearts really well and were always (and I mean always) together. She helped me become more confident in my identity and capabilities. She gave me so much more than a friendship; she gave me the power to love my true self.

As I write this, it makes me emotional to think I did not keep up with this relationship. But as time went on, we both started to grow in different directions and had different paths in life. Outgrowing your friends or your friends outgrowing you is normal, and it happens. What’s important to remember is your lack of communication does not make you (and hopefully them) any less thankful or appreciative of what they were for you in that season of life. So I do my best to always acknowledge where I came from and who helped shape me. Keeping this in mind allows me to continuously hold love in my heart for them.

This is one of my biggest regrets from school, not hanging on to any of my friendships that I made along the way. A lot of that regret comes from the commonly pushed narrative that you will meet your lifelong friends at college and have the best four years of your life, which didn’t ring true for me. So, if that was your experience too, then all this is to say that you are not alone.

5. Balancing school work, relationships, and athletics 

Honestly, I am not qualified to give advice on balancing these three, but I can certainly tell you what not to do. The first thing you need to do is figure out how to study and what works best for you. I often think back to how I would “study” for a high school exam vs. how I would study for a college exam, and they are not at all the same.

The next thing you need to do is really determine if you can study in groups or if you need to study alone. I am a social butterfly, so I chose to study with people in my major. This was the worst thing I could do for myself because all I would do is socialize instead of actually studying. Then I would leave the study group and be like, “Wow, I just spent 6 hours in the library studying. I should be ready for this exam,” when really all I did was chit-chat and waste time for 6 hours.

When you add athletics into the mix, it puts you on limited time and energy. I would argue that having a set schedule for training allows for better time management, which it did. I only had so much time to study and do homework.

Obviously, it can also have a negative impact because some nights all you want to do is go to bed so you can make it to 6 am lift, but you haven’t even started your homework that is due tomorrow. Then you have to decide if you want to get sleep and take the hit on your homework, or get little to no sleep, do the homework, and go to the lift with zero energy. Then you think about how you really want to do better this season in track and academics, so you think maybe you can just take the hit on the homework and do it later as a study exercise. So you decide that’s best, maybe do some of the homework so it’s not a zero in the grade book, and of course you never circle back to reviewing the homework as a study exercise, and the cycle continues.

6. Highschool doesn’t always prepare you for college, college doesn’t always prepare you for industry 

I don’t know about you, but every calculus exam I took, I was not allowed to have a calculator. That could not be further from reality as I work in my industry job. I often rely on Google and YouTube for expert advice, as well as my team members. I understand that an exam’s purpose is to get you to apply what you learned so that you can use those skills outside of an exam, but I do not think a calculator would hurt to have on a math exam. Other than those silly little nuances, I do think college does prepare you to be an independent thinker and to value knowledge and facts before assumptions and emotions, at least in my major, anyways.

There you have it, my six lessons I learned from my time at university. What was the most valuable lesson you learned during your academic career?