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Here's how to cope with first-year stress:
1. Prioritize your life and decide what is important and what can wait for a while.
2. Make lists whenever you feel overwhelmed, as everything on paper will look more organized.
3. Don't take on more than you can handle. Learn to say no.
4. Take care of yourself. Allow some time just for you. Not every book you read has to be a text book.
5. Communicate with your roommate if you're having issues with their disgusting habits, their smells, their friends hanging out in your room all the time, on their drunken behavior. See if you can resolve your differences. Learn the art of compromise.
6. Ask yourself if your roommate is really that bad? Can you live with the mess? Can you consider it to be a learning experience? After all it's only for one academic year.
7. If you can't go back to your room anymore because your roommate found the voodoo doll with the pins in it that was shaped suspiciously like her and now she's threatening to stop flushing the toilet: get help. Speak to a Residence Advisor and request a transfer to a different room. She may consider it to be too much paper work. Be persistent. Insist that it is in everyone's best interest for you to transfer. Be grown-up and calm about it. It will not help if you are reduced to a soggy, quivering mass on the floor.
8. If you already know that the registration process is going to be hideous, long and boring, take along your sense of humor and a good book. Or go to a college that has phone/computer registration.
9. Don't lose your ID card. Don't use it to scrape the ice off your windshield in the morning. Your ID card will become an integral part of you. You need it for the library, for registering, for buying stuff at the bookstore, for buying stuff at the cafeteria, for photocopying, for getting a transcript, for getting basketball/football/hockey/softball tickets, for getting concert tickets, for getting into 'student night' at the local nightclubs, and finally, you will need it for when you go to the graduation advisor and say: "I think I have enough credits now. Can I graduate please?"
10. Don't be late for class. Everyone turns to look at you when they hear the door open.
11. Sit near the front voluntarily. This is not high school. You do not have to conform. Be your own person.
12. If you are interested in your subject then act interested. This is higher education. You do not have to bring an apple for the teacher to be a teacher's pet. If you show an interest then they will show an interest in you.
13. Make good notes and use them. Keep a list of key words and learn their meanings.
14. Choose a major you are interested in. Or choose one that will earn you heaps and heaps of money. Or choose one that you are interested in and will earn you heaps and heaps of money.
15. Make friends with like-minded students in your classes.
16. Ask questions but not 'the wave your hand in the air and ask to use the bathroom' kind of questions.
17. Often the professor is the person who sets the exams. They are a good person to get to know in a positive way. It is not a good idea for them to get to know you through your notoriety.
18. Don't fall asleep in class. You are an adult now. You do not have to be there.
19. Use a word processor to write your papers so the Teaching Assistant can read what you have to say and give you a good grade. Use the spell checker but read through your paper even after it's been spell checked to make sure what you've written makes sense.
20. It helps to have good grades. You can avoid academic probation that way.
21. The library is a nice, warm, safe place to be. You can study in peace with the gentle sound of other people's cellular phones ringing all around you. You can read lots of interesting books. If you ask really politely the nice librarian might even let you check the books out.
22. Make friends. The friends you make at college last a lot longer than four years. They can last all the way through your Masters and your Doctorate.
23. Join a club or a society that caters to a specific interest you have. Or do volunteer work. This looks really good on your resume as well.
24. Take part in study groups.
25. Read (or work for) the campus newspaper. It usually mentions all the events occurring on campus or locally.
26. Join an intramural sports team or work out at the sports center. You always meet the most attractive people when you have huge damp circles of sweat under your arms, staining your lumpy, out-of-shape sweatshirt.
27. Don't get drunk on your own.
28. If you're going to have a party, have it in somebody else's room. But be responsible enough not to let anyone drive home.
29. As a general rule of thumb - be nice to people. You never know when you might need them.
30. Stay healthy.
31. Buy a good student cookbook. Don't eat anything you're unfamiliar with until you've located where the bathroom is. Don't eat anything that has anything else growing on it. Don't eat anything that has not been wrapped or sealed. Remember to heat things up until they're really hot. Don't re-freeze anything that's been allowed to thaw out. Don't eat anything you can't identify. Like grits, for example.
32. Exercise regularly. Walk as much as you can. Drink plenty of water. Take deep breaths of fresh air as often as you can (even if it means travelling out of Los Angeles to do so). Buy ear-plugs and sleep well.
33. Find out where the health center is. Register with them if you need to.
34. Have some fun. Start to enjoy everything that you're doing. Even the studying. Your university/college years can be among the best of your life.
35. And remember, if all else fails and you're completely miserable, click your heels together three times and say: "There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place…………".
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