My take on surviving a full year at university (Q&A)

After a lot of procrastination and sleeping for literally 9-10 hours every night the past month (it's been a tough year, yo), I have finally decided to get my shiz together and crank out my first blog post in over three months. I posted a question sticker on my Instagram story a couple of weeks ago asking y'all to ask me some uni-related questions on just about any topic imaginable and I got some pretty good ones. So before I go off on too long of a tangent, let's get right into it.

Q: How was it being away from home? How did you cope with homesickness?

A: I could probably write a whole article on this question alone but I'll try to keep it to the point. For the first six months at uni, a WHOLE semester, being away from home was unbearable. I struggled a LOT with homesickness and my mental health suffered severely. A great deal of it was due to the fact that I had a pretty bad roommate experience at the beginning of the year, which only got resolved in around April, I think. After that things did get noticeably better, but I still had to count down the days until I could go home and I cried over missing home and my family many nights. I think a lot of my emotions didn't stem from homesickness per se but from a longing for "the way things used to be". I actually started wishing I could go back to school (SHOCK AND HORROR), see my usual friends in the LRC room every morning, go to Physics and just be able to call it a day at 1pm and then living my own life. You see, in school you have two spheres of life: school and home (which is non-schoolish). At uni, however, your whole existence becomes university. Everything you do is situated on the campus where you attend your lectures, the people you live with in res are the ones you see in your lectures on said campus and everything you are becomes saturated in this small, confined little world. That's what got to me the most. Yet, despite all this being said and all the challenges, things eventually got a whole lot better in the second semester. I started feeling so much more grounded, my mental health improved tremendously and although I still longed for going home, it was no longer the ONLY thing I was ever focused on anymore. I can't really attribute this improvement to anything specific but I think a great deal thereof was thanks to making my immediate environment feel more like home by cooking my own meals, having regular video chats with my family and just realising how fortunate I am to actually be in university studying something I absolutely love. Furthermore, I made the choice to become more involved in opportunities offered on campus, such as applying for leadership positions in my res, signing up for a short course in Health and Leadership and leaving behind the safety and comfort of a recluse lifestyle for coffee dates and midnight chats with friends in my room, even when I should've been studying or working on something "more important". Surrounding yourself with people who actually make you happy and add value to your life, is a great way of overcoming the loneliness that is so characteristic of feeling homesick.

Q: Is the hype surrounding university still there after a year or does it fade eventually?

A: The hype didn't fade - it DISAPPEARED. I'm not saying that the university experience isn't great and fantastic and memorable. It's just not something to look forward to your entire high school career or to dream and fantasise about for an unthinkable amount of time. Going to university means being an adult. You don't become an adult when you turn 18. You become an adult when you have to buy your own groceries, have your own cellphone banking app, have to book consultations with your lecturers, make your own doctor's appointments, spend hundreds on toiletries every month and pick yourself up when you have a panic attack at 2 in the morning. Yes, you make friends, you see new places and experience a multitude of new things; yet, even on the best of days, being a university student is somewhat challenging.

Q: What do you consider the best and worst part of this year?

A: The worst part of this year was without a doubt learning to be a whole adult person on my OWN, with very little help from anyone, seeing as my parents were more than 1,500 kilometres away in a different country. I was faced with challenges and obstacles that I have never been faced with before. However, I am utterly grateful for how this year has shaped me into the actual embodiment of a strong, independent woman. I discovered strength and endurance within myself which I was entirely unaware of before. The best part of this year, though, was becoming passionate about and falling completely in love with my course. Imagine this: in December 2018 I was still contemplating studying a different degree than the one I got accepted for and I wasn't even sure if I wanted to go into any form of law whatsoever. Yet, here I am now, 12 months later, more convinced than ever before that I am doing something that is perfect for me. Obviously, being the realist I am, I'm not going to be overly optimistic, seeing as I still have three years of my degree left - only time will tell, honestly. However, for now the future seems bright and I'll keep on dreaming about Harvard Law School for that Master's degree.

Q: How did you practice effective time management this year?

A: Time management can sometimes pretty much fly out the window when things get a bit chaotic and Netflix seems a lot more alluring than working out a schedule or to-do list for the next day. I'm not going to lie and say I didn't spend countless nights trying to ease and treat my fatigue after a long week by watching YouTube or series or even just lying in bed scrolling through my Instagram explore page - I simply NEEDED it sometimes. However, I managed to maintain a pretty solid gym schedule, get distinctions for 8 out of my 9 modules and balance two pretty decent "side hustles" this year. This isn't me bragging of course, I'm just saying it is possible to get things done and to still maintain your sanity through it all. Planners, schedules, calendars, timetables to-do lists - these are your friends. Above all, though, prioritising what you love and what is important to you is probably the cornerstone of time management. If something matters to you, you will make time for it, no questions asked. If staying fit and strong is important to you but you have lectures from 8-5, you'll wake up at 5:30 to work out before lectures start. If maintaining a certain level of academic excellence is important to you, you will make sure to do the pre-reading, the tutorials, read and summarise the cases and study well in advance. If connecting with people and having strong interpersonal relationships matters to you, you will dedicate time to seeing your friends and having meaningful conversations with them. You get to CHOOSE how you manage your time, that's the power you have.

I think I'll call it a day with those questions. If you made it up to this point, thank you for reading this blog post and for supporting snippets of my most intimate thoughts and experiences. Stay tuned for my NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS blog post coming super soon.