By SARAH VEENSTRA
Hop on board the stress express! Where nerves, fear of failure and pure and utter excitement are just a few of the adrenaline pumpers firing the blood through your veins.
It’s the first day of the rest of your life. At least, that’s what most students think their first day of college. The first week, students often see themselves accomplishing something great, what they don’t realize is that their looking glass is actually a set of beer goggles on steroids, all thanks to frosh week.
No one ever thinks they’ll get out of high school. They know it will happen one day but that “one day” feels like it will never come. It will never be a life that will happen to you, but here it is. Welcome! Your reward for the last four years is another two to four years. (It sounds a lot like prison, doesn’t it?) But they may be the best of your life.
To get you off on the right foot, here are some things that some of Conestoga College’s seasoned veterans wished they had known before their first day.
“I always procrastinated in high school,” said second-year bookkeeping student Connor Cota. “You can’t do that here. I wish I knew the amount of time that you have to put into each assignment. It’s important to plan ahead.”
According to Conestoga faculty, a student should spend at least an equal amount of time on coursework outside the classroom as they spend in the classroom. A bookkeeping course that is three hours per week requires students to spend at least three hours on course material outside the classroom.
Second-year health office administration student Carly Miller wishes she had been privy to the college’s unwritten secret of “suggested assignments.”
“Do them,” Miller said. “I’ve had teachers say that they’re only suggested to us as assignments and at the end of the year, those teachers say that they’re now going to grade them. I didn’t do them and I missed out.”
While suggested assignments are often just as they sound – assignments that teachers suggest doing for the purpose of practising the knowledge they’re teaching – doing them can not only increase your proficiency, it can increase your GPA.
“Something I also wish I did first year was take summer classes,” said Miller. “Someone in our program took some classes in the summer and I didn’t even know that was an option. It would’ve really lightened the workload if I had been able to take some of the harder courses in the summer.”
There are several required courses available for enrolment during the summer months of May to September. The courses will depend on program and availability.
Big or small, one thing will never change for students at Conestoga and it’s the one thing almost every student needs to know, or at least will quickly learn in their first year. It’s a piece of knowledge that is invaluable compared to anything else that can be learned in a classroom and early childhood education graduate Phoenix Eyre was willing to share it.
“The parking here sucks,” said Eyre. “Even though the orange lot is divided into a cheaper and more expensive lot, you might as well just pay the cheaper price because the lot is so full that you’ll end up spending most of your time in the cheaper lot anyways.”
Good luck future Condors. May the parking pass be with you.
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