“What College Will Be Like”

Ever since the beginning of high school, teachers harped on my classmates and I about college expectations. Writing classes had papers on reading assignments due every week. I was told, “this is preparing you for college” and “professors won’t baby you.” As Courtney said in class, high school scared us with many false claims about college. Nothing they said could have prepared me for being a student at Geneseo. There are so many factors that affect your college experience: major, living situation, other extra-curricular obligations. There is no one way to describe a student’s individual college journey and the people that influence them along the way.

 

Not even the GLOBE, Geneseo’s Learning Outcomes for Baccalaureate Education can describe my journey so far as a freshman. I have mixed feelings about how it relates to my experience here at Geneseo. The GLOBE is a about a page long, so it is pretty broad. The statements are meant to relate to Geneseo’s student body as a whole. One statement that caught my attention was, “In support of Geneseo’s institutional mission as a center of excellence in undergraduate education.” This sounds nice but most colleges have that end goal. As a high school student, I already knew I was going to college to get a degree. I needed preparation for the personal struggles that came in the process of getting my degree. Neither my previous teachers or the GLOBE talked about the process of being a young adult on your own for the first time. I have grown so much in just one semester: changing majors, walking onto a sports team, and living in a suite with people I had never met. I think the GLOBE would be more personal to me if a learning outcome was about finding yourself, and learning which programs you fit in. I’m still a figuring out a plan as an undeclared freshman. I wasn’t planning on switching my major after first semester, but I have grown so much in the process. The defining part of college so far for me has been finding my strengths and weaknesses.

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