If You're Reading This Its Too Late

However amount of preparation you think you have done for college is not enough.  You might think that you are prepared for anything college has to throw at you, but you are not.  You might think that the skills you have acquired through your 12 years of public or private education transfer seamlessly into college, but they don’t.  That is the first and most important thing you have to come to terms with when you come to college, you have to forget what you know and brace yourself for whats to come.  In many ways this first lesson of survival in college is similar to big wave surfing.
Big wave surfing is a subcategory of surfing where all the waves are at least 20 feet tall.  These waves are unimaginably strong and can burst a human eardrum in a second.  So when a surfer falls off his or her board into one of these waves it is important they follow very strict rules in order to survive.  One of the most important rules is not to tense up.  A surfer has to relax their body and accept that no matter how hard they try they cannot fight the wave, the wave is simply to strong.  They have to relax and go where the wave takes them so they can find the best opportunity to make it back to the surface and take a sweet deep breathe of oh so precious oxygen.
For this metaphor the surfer represents the freshmen and the wave represents everything related to college.  The wave not only includes a new, much harder school work load, but also new responsibilities and freedoms associated with living on your own and taking care of oneself for the first time ever.  If you don't relax and just go with the flow of all the new things in your life the wave will crush you and spit you out broken and unwilling to proceed.  But if you forget your arrogance and don't try to fight the wave with stubbornness and stupidity, and instead adapt to the new circumstances you will make it out a better and stronger individual.
These adaptations are not easy and require baby steps.  But you have to be willing to take these baby steps.  Colleges, like Springfield, have certain facilities put in place to help freshman like tutoring, success centers and guidance counselors.  However these services won’t find you when your in need, you have to swallow your pride and go seek out these resources yourself.  To not use these services would be asinine since the funds for them come out of your tuition.  These services work to help you in all manners of things like for instance your college writing course.
College writing is not a particularly difficult class considering the rest of your future course load, but that does not make it any less important.  Being able to write ideas on paper in a comprehensible manor is a vital skill to have for most classes and in order to get a jobs, which is the ultimate goal of most college students.  So just because it is not a hard course does not give permission to slack off and not take it seriously.  It might seem that the skills being practiced in this class are very repetitive and what you have been learning since kindergarten.  However, all the practice is important so you can find your own voice and style of writing.  In my own experience, college writing has taught me the style of writing that I am most comfortable with and how to employ that style in a wide variety of different writing prompts.  Once I found my voice and style as a writer, my writing for my other classes became so much easier and the process of getting ideas from mind to pen became so much more fluid and organic.
In conclusion, don’t underestimate the positive effect of taking college writing, and definitely don't underestimate the raw power the wave that is college posses over you.