My college experience freshman year was not at all what I had anticipated it being. I initially expected to be working like crazy most of the time but spend my downtime with groups of friends. Instead, I found myself completely unmotivated to work and spending most of my time in my dorm room, alone.

Starting college brings with it a whole new level of independence. This independence, however, can be a double-edged sword. For me, it quickly turned into a feeling of loneliness and isolation, causing me to become a recluse for the majority of the school year. In hindsight, there are many things I would have done differently to mitigate the loneliness and isolation I faced as a first-year student. So I have a few pieces of advice that I would tell my freshman self to have avoided the situation I found myself in.

The biggest piece of advice I can give to any incoming first-year student is to occupy as much of your time as possible. The last thing you want starting off college is to spend a significant portion of your time alone and unproductive. I spent most of the time I wasn’t in class shacked up in my room watching TV. There would be days where I would not interact with a single other person unless I absolutely had to for some reason. The lack of obligations ended up making me not just unmotivated to work, but also averse to reaching out to anyone I had met. I cannot stress how much limiting your alone time will benefit not just your abilities as a student, but also your mental health. Unproductivity and isolation foster so many negative emotions, making your college experience miserable when it never should be. Spend your time out of class studying, exercising, working, making plans with friends, joining as many clubs as possible or anything you can do to keep yourself occupied.

In the same vein, don’t get discouraged if you don’t immediately find your niche. It can be very deterring if people around you seem to immediately find their place in college while you’re struggling to find where you belong. During the first activities fair I attended, I signed up for a bunch of club mailing lists and went to a handful of meetings for each. After a few weeks, I stopped attending all of them because none of them felt like the right fit. This led me to generalize all the clubs and assume that none of them were for me, when in reality Washington University has a plethora of different student clubs and organizations. For me to have made that generalization was naive and ended up hurting my confidence and motivation at the time. There’s always a community for you here. It may take time to find your place, but don’t feel dismayed if your first or even your first few attempts aren’t successful.

The last piece of advice I have is don’t be afraid to reach out to people. All those people you met during pre-orientation programs or Bear Beginnings are just as nervous about meeting new people and finding people to do things with as you are. Don’t feel as if you are overstepping by asking a couple of people you met to get food or do something together. The more active you are in trying to stay in contact with the people you meet, the easier it will be to stay friends with them. This was something I was particularly bad at my first semester and really amplified the amount of time I spent alone.

A lot these issues I faced resulted from my struggles with mental illness, making my ability to do a lot of the things I mentioned much harder. However, I still regret a lot of the ways I approached my first year, and if I could go back and change it, I would. So take this article as somewhat of a warning. Don’t hit the same pitfalls that I did. Learn from my mistakes.