Learning Experience
As you enter your freshman year of
college, you realize that you can start on a new slate and you can be whoever
you choose to be. Usually, you will attempt to change and be someone other than
you were in high school, but in the end your true character will unfold itself
and trying to be someone other than yourself will not work to your advantage.
When you leave high school, you leave your friends and past life in the back of
your mind and begin focusing on your new journey. That journey begins with
learning how to sign up for classes, knowing where your lectures are held,
figuring out how to purchase food, and much more. However, the most important
part of the journey is discovering who you are and discovering who your true
friends are. In college, you will constantly come across new people and you
will build relationships and make new connections with students from across the
country and beyond.
However, meeting hundreds and maybe
even thousands of people will make you feel as if you are friends with
everyone. You will have hundreds of phone numbers, followers on social media
sites, and you will know the names of so many. But, if you sit back and think
about which ones are your true friends, how do you know? Ask yourself the
question, “If I were to leave college today, how many of the people that I met
would contact me ever again to see how I am doing?” So, how do we know who our
true friends are?
Well, it is the ‘learning experience’
which enables you with the ability to clearly determine who will always be
there for you. In college, we are learning a different life in a foreign
environment. We are persistently learning fresh knowledge about life,
relationships, academics, ourselves, and miscellaneous information that we will
use to be successful. It takes messing up to not make a mistake again.
Therefore, it takes experiencing to even have the chance of making a poor
decision. So does this mean that we should all make poor decisions early in our
lives so that we may have a wider understanding of how not to mess up? Yes and
no. We should not aim to make non-intellectual decisions, but once you enter adulthood,
any decision can affect your reputation and ability to acquire a job. Making
one corrupt choice can cause your downfall when you reach an age where you are
expected to never make poor judgments. For college students, the time is almost
at its end to make poor decisions and still be able to bounce back in a
reasonable amount of time.
Essentially, the most important
aspect of college besides attaining an education is to find yourself and to
find who your true friends are. Secondly, it takes the ‘learning experience’ to
realize who your true friends are and inside of the ‘learning experience’
consists of several things. First, you must mess up to find who your friends
are. You will know when you messed up and learned something that will serve to
better you when you wake up and think about who was there to help you. You must
fail. Without failing, how do you know how it feels to be at a low-point in
your life? You must also learn to adapt. If you cannot adapt to your
surroundings, you will never grow. If you are not growing, you will fail to
reach your highest potential. You will experience a lot in college and will
learn an abundance of life-knowledge.
In my perspective, you will learn
more in one weekend than you will learn in a week in college. Academics are
vital to your success, but life-skills and common sense, which is only attained
through experiencing firsthand, is what enables you to accomplish the toughest
of tasks. If you do not know who you are, then what purpose does academic
knowledge have? It starts with YOU and discovering what YOU enjoy doing, what
YOU want to do with YOUR life, and who YOU want to be. We are in college to
learn and gain new knowledge, but we are also here for four years or more if we
head to graduate school, to learn about the things we cannot be taught by a
professor or by our parents.
You will discover who your true
friends are when you have a poor experience or make a poor decision because
those who care about you will be by your side the entire time. You will have
your friends. You will have your best buds. You will have your party friends.
You will have your business friends. And you will have your lifelong friends.
You place the people you know into different groups based on their importance
and connection to you. Learning is endless. Find who you are and find who your
true friends are. Learn to learn and live to learn.
Austin Baker
Twitter/Instagram: @ABakerPresident
DreamsDriveDetermination@gmail.com
Austin.Baker25@yahoo.com
