A little too much ME TIME

I moved abroad for my university, I left my home feeling really excited with the opportunity I was given and extremely determined to work hard and get the best degree I could hope for.

One thing I didn’t put much focus on was everything apart from my studies. Now that may sound like a good thing but honestly it is not.

University life should not be spent all alone, it is not possible to spend the entire duration of your degree with yourself and not socialize with anyone else.

There always comes a time when you wish you had a friend close by, you have friends back home but due to differing time zones and their busy schedule, there are times when you don’t talk for days on end.

Communication, in general, is very important.

I spent the first month of my university, either studying or sitting in my room, not that it is bad but the outweighing negative impact of that was the fact that I got a little too comfortable with being on my own, to the extent that I was afraid of having anyone over, because living on my own had become a norm.

University students have a general stereotype of socializing, which is going out to clubs and bars, getting drunk and just having a ball of a time doing that. Having had a pretty long educational background from the UK, on moving back I had the same opinion.

Then the university doors flung open and showed me that the stereotype was very wrong.

The beauty of going to a university is the diversity of people you will find there. You’ll meet people from all walks of life, people who have the same traditional values as you and those who completely don’t. That’s where the other aspect of university life comes in, that is growing as an individual. See, when you constatntly communicate with different people, you realise who you are and where your boundaries lie.

So socializing for you and a lot of other individuals is not going out to party, rather it is sitting in the university’s cafe and having coffee together or going out and exploring the city.

Then again all of these things can be done alone and you may be thinking that,

“hey that is exactly what I do, what’s so wrong with it? At least I don’t do anything wrong”

A friend once said to me;

“What’s the worst that could happen, you wont like the people, you wont enjoy socializing? If that’s the case you can go back to the norm and enjoy your own company, Mate you have nothing to lose!”

I guess that is the pure essence of being a young adult (that’s what a freshman is classified as in the real world), going out of your comfort zone (obviously not so far that you no longer know where that zone lies) and experimenting with yourself.

University is the time where you really discover who you are and exactly what you’re capable of, this is not only tested in socializing but in your courses too.

So for all those freshmen out there, don’t worry about going out of your comfort zone, experiment, socialize, get to know anyone who seems interesting because these 3 or 4 years will never come back, enjoy yourself, communicate with the people around you because great memories are experienced and shared together, never alone .

You have nothing to lose!