Preparing for Your Freshman Year of College
High school students hear a lot of advice from friends, family, teachers, and guidance counselors, but the truth is no two students are the same and neither are any two schools. Your success in college will be based on the specific demands of your school and instructors, as well as your own personal goals and measures of success.
If you're a "go with the flow" and "figure it out along the way" type, we applaud your easygoing attitude. But for those of us who need more structure in our lives to put our minds at ease, we put this guide together to get you thinking and planning so you can ABSOLUTELY CRUSH your first year of college.
Your Absolute Best Freshman Checklist
There are a number of key important things to remember as you start your college/university journey, and while there are some good resources for freshman year out there, we also wanted to point you in the direction of some helpful hints as you prepare for college. The following list gathers together some of the most important resources you need as a freshman getting ready for this next chapter. We want you to easily follow the steps for success in your first year at college or university.
We’ve broken things down into the various areas you need to prepare for as a college freshman, and we hope you find these tips and tricks helpful!
1. Prepare Mentally and Emotionally for College
College is fantastic for the educational opportunities that it offers, but it is also the time when you might be moving away for the first time. There are a lot of mental and emotional changes and challenges coming your way, especially if you are going away to college, far from family and friends.
It is important to be prepared for this type of shift. You may be leaving your long-term friends who have helped you grow to who you are. Those people who knew you best as a child might not be the ones you grow with as a freshman, and that can feel like a strange adjustment you need to be ready for in advance. You’ll make new friends during your freshman year, but you’ll want to make sure that you take care of yourself as you make all these changes.
We have gathered together our most curated and best list of advice, tips, and links to help you prepare for your first year as a freshman college student, whether you are right out of high school or going to college for the first time as a mature student.
Whatever your story, our list of freshman resources are for you to make sure you settle in the best way possible.
Best Ways to Stay Mentally Grounded
If you are moving far away, make sure to set up some group chats and standing video conferences with your friends and family at home. You might not need them, but it’s better to schedule some standing dates in advance, and that way if you feel lonely or scared, you’ll have something to look forward to.
Develop mindfulness practice to be able to stay grounded. Putting in some good strategies to have mindfulness that can help you with school work can also help you to stay grounded.
Here are some 5 helpful resources for mindfulness that can help you stay mentally grounded and emotionally stable as you enter this phase of your life as a new freshman:
2. Prepare Academically for College
There’s a big difference between high school and college. The expectations between high school and college can be quite different. In high school teachers are there (for the most part) to help you learn, but depending on what college you attend, your professors may be first and foremost researchers, not teachers. Their expectations may be very different from what you are used to.
College is also a place that assumes students are adults who are responsible for their own learning. You’ll have to manage your own schedule, choose your own courses, and engage with many disciplines in a more scholarly way.
All of that can be stressful and even overwhelming. Here are some of our suggestions for how best to prepare academically for these changing expectations at the college level.
Best Ways to Study at College
It will be up to you to find the routines that work best for you at college. Do you study best in your residence or the library or in a coffee shop? It will be up to you to make that judgment for yourself. No parent or teacher will be there to make sure that you study most effectively; it’s all up to you.
No one will check your homework for you, so it is up to you to determine how much ou–of-class work you have to do to be prepared and avoid the common grade shock that students experience when they get their first college assignment back.
A general rule is that full-time students should spend a minimum of 40 hours per week in course-related activities. That includes both in-class and out-of-class academic activity. So if your class meets for 6 hours of instruction per week, and you are taking 4 courses, then you should be spending an additional 4 hours per class on reading, studying, and preparing for each class.
That can be a general sense of the average amount of time that students should spend studying at college. Of course, some students will spend more time and some will spend less, and you might think about the quality of time that you spend studying. Are you studying as efficiently as you might be able to? As you prepare for college, learning tricks to study efficiently will be an important skill to hone.
Here are five tips to study efficiently as you prepare for the new expectations of college include:
Best Way to Choose Courses at College
In addition to learning how to study effectively for courses at college that are different from what you might have experienced in high school, you also want to make sure you choose the right courses to set you up for success.
There are a lot of things to consider when it comes to course selection. You want to make sure that you choose the mandatory and required courses for your program, and you want to know what are the prerequisites for your program in subsequent years. No one wants to be a senior, months away from graduation, to find out that you can’t take that one course that you really want or need to graduate because you didn’t take the prerequisite course early on!
Things to ask yourself about course selection include:
- whether the professor is one whose teaching style works well for you or not; check out professorial ratings and what other students might have to say about instructors at your college to see if their style meshes with your way of learning.
- ask yourself about the evaluations. Check out the syllabus, if there are lots of exams, and you do better with take-home assignments, see if there’s another section of the course.
Here are our top 5 resources to help you as you choose your courses as a freshman:
3. Prepare with the Right Tools for College
There are lots of practical tools and materials that you’ll need to be a successful college student. What are the right notebooks? Which is the best laptop? Do you need a printer? These and many more are the types of questions that freshmen are faced with. Once we’ve been a college student for a while these things seem really commonsensical, but at the outset it’s not 100% clear.
We’ve broken down our best suggestions for the tools that you really do need to be successful and the things that are not going to be worth it. For instance, do you really need a printer? Chances are, you might not. Most colleges have moved to an electronic submission policy integrated with the Learning Management System at the particular college. So long as you can upload your assignments electronically by the due date, you should be a-okay.
But if your college doesn’t give you information about their Learning Management System (i.e. Canvas, or D2L, or Blackboard etc.), then you might have to submit things in hard copy. If that is the case, then you might think about getting an inexpensive printer to take with you. There are many smaller inkjet models that won’t take too much space in your residence room.
Here are our top 5 suggestions for the things that you absolutely need to know when it comes to determining the tools and things you want to pack up with you and make sure you have access to while you‘re at college.
Best Computers for College
Our students have provided their curated lists just for you that outline what laptops and computers they recommend. Students these days can do many things on their phones and tablets, but really nothing beats a laptop or desktop. We generally focus on laptops for students, because you need to be able to move and be on the go with your device with you in the library or study hall. Please check out our lists of the best laptops and ways of taking notes on computer that are designed to help you be the best student you can be:
Best Apps for College
Computers, e-readers, notebooks, and note-taking tools can certainly be part of your arsenal as a college freshman, but you also need to become familiar with all the apps out there that are designed to help you succeed.
It is easy to be overwhelmed with the many different apps out there, and not all of them are the best. The Wizeprep study resources that are tailor made for your campus and course are built on a web app, but there are many mobile apps and other tools that can help you be a successful student.
Here are our top 5 recommended apps for college students:
4. Prepare Financially for College
College may well be the single most expensive component to your life as a student. But over and above tuition, there are a whole host of other financial considerations that new college students must take into consideration.
You will need to balance your own budget, which includes planning your food budget and determining (realistically) how much you can spend on fun and entertainment. Most students (and you might be one of them!) have family financial help as you embark on your college journey. If that is the case, then it is important to sit down with your family members who are contributing to your college finances to determine their expectations of you as it relates to finances.
- Will they set a budget for you?
- Will there be any top ups if you run out of money?
- Do they expect to be paid back?
- What items are out of scope that you’ll have to pay for?
- Do they expect you to get a job?
These are just some of the questions that you should discuss so that you know your financial situation and can begin planning for things as you take this important step forward into your college life, but also into what will become your financial future as an adult. How you learn to manage your finances in college can set you on the right (or wrong) path for your entire financial health as you enter the next phase of your life.
Our friends at Annuity have a whole guide for financial literacy at college that helps to ground you in the financial realities of preparing for college.
So learning to prepare for your financial life as a college student is just as important as preparing for all the other aspects of college life that you are familiar with.
Best Ways to Find Scholarships as a Student
Hands down the best way to be set for financial success as a college student is to find as many scholarships, grants, and awards that you are eligible for and apply for them. You can’t win what you don’t apply for. There are often little known or under used scholarships or awards that various donors have endowed at colleges across North America, and if you find those awards and apply, you might be the only student applying in any given year, thus increasing your chances of winning.
Whatever the case may be if you seek, find, and apply for college scholarships you can not only help yourself financially, but you begin building up your CV so that when it comes time to apply for jobs, you look more competitive by having awards and scholarships to your name.
Here‘s some advice for finding scholarships as a college student that you might find helpful:
Best Ways to Save Money on Campus
Here are our top 5 recommendations to help you save money and be fiscally responsible as a student. It’s not always easy to save money and be prepared financially for what it means to be a college student, but we find these tips to be the tried and true ways to help students (just like you) master their finances as freshmen all the way through graduation.
Best Ways to Make Money on Campus
There are two key components to money management, and these apply to you as a student, but also to you in all other aspects of your life, and that is how much money to make an how much money you save/spend. If you want or need to balance your studies with a part time job, there are some ways that you can do this really well and not interfere with your grades, and there are ways where you might find yourself struggling to keep up and get the grades you want.
You might consider summer jobs and internships as being the best way to work full time and save up money for the academic year. Another suggestion is to work as many hours during time off from school (such as during winter break). Otherwise, if you have a part-time job during the school year, make sure to manage your schedule during heaving midterm and exam times to ensure that your studies don’t suffer.
Here are our top 5 recommendations for making money on campus as a college student:
5. Prepare For Campus Life
The college adventure is one where there’s also a lot logistically to consider. There are questions about residence or where you can park your car on campus. It’s best if you can prepare in advance for the technical or logistical components of arriving on campus before you show up for frosh week/welcome week.
That first week on campus as a freshman can be one of the best weeks of your life. You might make the best friends you’ll carry with you until you are old and grey. You might meet the love of your life. You may just have the best party you could ever imagine. Or some combination of all that!
But in order for that first week and first year to be awesome, you definitely want to make sure that you get all the details sorted. So we’ve curated the checklist of things that you need to bring or think about before heading to campus.
Best Tips About Where to Live as a Student
One of the most important logistical things to get control of before you head to campus is your living situation. Will you be on campus? Will you be in residence? Will you have room mates? A quintessential college experience often revolves around living in residence — at least at first — and there are some important things to consider about residence life.
However, not all students want to or can live in residence. What are some of the other factors to consider about where you might live during the school year. We’ve collected some of our top resources for freshmen to think through where they might live as a college student.
Best Tips of What to Bring to Campus
You may know about your textbook lists or your laptop needs well before you show up to campus, but what about all the other things that you might need as a college student? What are the things that you should bring to campus to be set up for success and comfort? There are a few things that we recommend students make sure that they bring with them or pick up once they’ve arrived on campus. Thinking through some of your needs can make the transition to college be a little bit more smoothly.
- Do you have inexpensive decor items to make your space your own?
- Will you be able to decorate your room?
- Will you stay at home in your childhood room? How can you update it?
Here are some suggestions for further reading in order be able to prepare your space to be able to be the best you as you settle into your new home and new life as a college student.
6. Prepare to be a Healthy College Student
College life is notorious for being unhealthy for students. It can be hard to eat healthily on campus. It can be hard to keep up with workout habits or start new ones as a freshman. As well, many students face a new bevvy of substances as college students than they’ve ever faced before. Alcohol and various drugs can be the downfall of many students. The American Addiction Center suggests that various substance abuse can be common among certain college students. It is important to resist the temptations of substances that can lead to unhealthy lifestyle choices.
As well, as a college student, you might also find that the late night studying leads to an over-reliance on caffeine.
Despite the fact that college and university can be the most exciting time of your life, it is not without its health risks.
Best Ways to Stay Physically Healthy as a Student
Of course if you’re a college athlete then you’ll be physically healthy for sure. You’ll be in the gym and playing on your team, staying in peak shape. For the rest, you can join intramural sports or take advantage of the college athletic facilities. Make sure to build in routines that help you get out there and stay in physical shape.
Here are some suggestions for freshmen to stay in shape or get in shape. Studies show that the relationship between physical health and scholastic achievement is a tight one, and we’ve got our top suggestions to keep you physically healthy as a college student.
Best Ways to Eat Well in College
The other part to living healthily as a college student is to making sure that you’re on top of your diet and nutrition. It can be hard as a freshman to be prepared to eat well and be at your best when it comes to nutrition, but these tips and tricks can keep you healthy.
We all know about the importance of diet and exercise to mental health and intellectual prowess, but it’s easy to take eating for granted. We grab a snack, or we chomp down on some fast food, but neither of these choices fuel you for the intellectual demands of being a college student.
But let’s be real: who has time (or space) to cook gourmet healthy meals as a student? Rather than take on that burden, we’ve got some suggestions that can help prevent the worst nutritional disasters.
Preparing for college as a freshman can be exciting, and it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. You can be prepared for your freshman year (and beyond!) by checking out all these resources.
In addition to being prepared in all these ways for college, be sure that you are prepared academically with the right study resources. The Wizeprep study pass—an all inclusive subscription with campus- and course-specific study help—offers you curated course help that you can use to review, refresh, study, or even cram the night before a big test.
So be prepared for college and get the most out of it!
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