Because by no means did I have a perfect college career. By and large, I’m happy with how things turned out and I didn’t make any huge mistakes, but there are some things I would have done differently.

If I were magically time-warped back to my freshman year. Now while that is unlikely to happen as I haven’t angered any wizards lately, I still think that detailing these mistakes and going through what I would have done differently will be useful for other people, who might be finding themselves in a similar situation shortly including possibly you, that’s because one of my most important beliefs is that you can learn just as much from the failures of others as you can from your own, as long as you can quiet that little voice in your head, that says, yeah, but that won’t happen to me, right, then you can start to use the experiences of others to prepare yourself for potential situations in your own life.

AMBITION DELISION, BURNOUT:

First up on my list was the mistake I made in both my freshman and my sophomore year, which was starting up the semester way too gung-ho, thinking I could do literally every single reading assignment, every single piece of homework, everything, and then fizzling out after just a few weeks.

I’m not going to lie, I came to college as a very ambitious student, as is befitting somebody who would make an entire website on academic success and I wanted to do really well in my classes,

I wanted to ace every single test and do all the reading so when I started my semesters, I told myself,

I’m going to read every single reading assignment and I’m going take notes on every single thing that I read, but as you can probably guess, that didn’t last for very long and there’s a big difference between say my first-week class notes, which I’ll show right here and well, the marked lack of any notes beyond that.

So lesson here, for those of you, who think you might, as long as you are maintaining a good sleep schedule and if you do want to use caffeine or you enjoy drinks that have it, maybe stick to coffee or tea instead, they’re a lot healthier and if you aren’t going to Starbucks and buying $4 lattes, they are a lot cheaper as well.

JUMPING THE INTERNSHIP GUN:

So the next mistake I’m going to list here is jumping the gun when it comes to selecting an internship.

So this goes back to my sophomore year of college, I spent the summer before that year and the very beginning of that year going as hard as I could to try to get an internship.

I went to every single networking session, that I could learn about, I went to all the career fairs, I went to all the pre-career fairs and the pre-, pre-career fair breakfasts, I met recruiters from dozens of different companies, I handed out tons of different resumes and all of this work paid off.

After the career fair season, after all that kind of died down, I was presented with no less than seven interview offers at seven different companies and I was pretty stoked about these, but I didn’t end up going to any of them you going to think that if you let this opportunity slip through your fingers, you’re making a horrible decision, but it is okay to say thank you so much for the opportunity,

can I take a few days to think about it? From there, you can start to analyze your options I did this internship and then I went and started my own business and haven’t worked a full-time job since.

FAILING TO ASK FOR HELP:

I failed to take advantage of the professor’s office hours for a lot of my college career. When I got into my junior and senior years, I started to get smart and I started to use them a lot more often, but in my freshman and sophomore years.

I hardly ever went to the professor’s office during hours and what’s worse, I remember professors offering completely free review sessions, you know, after a class, when people could just come and ask whatever questions they wanted in review for tests and I skipped these too, these are goldmines, I remember going to a couple of these during my, again junior and senior years and using them to get really good grades on tests. because teachers would essentially answer questions straight from the study guides.

I skipped these in my first couple of years in college and I skipped the professor’s office hours, which meant that again, when I got stuck on tough problems, I wasn’t utilizing the resources that I had available to me, I was just disengaging and telling myself, I can’t do that. So if you’re in college, or even if you’re in high school, use the help you have available to you professors are there to help you, not just by lecturing to you at the front of the classroom, but by working on one with you as well.

THE DATING MISTAKES:

Alright, this is I think the most emotional one on the list here, I titled it in my list, Seeking Companionship in the Wrong Places. So to put a long story very short, the February of my junior year, I ended up breaking up with the girl I was dating at the time, and for a while, I was fine being single, but as many people end up finding, they start to get lonely after a while and I remember that my senior year fall started and I found myself in what I would say is the closest to depression, that I have ever been in, I don’t think that it was a true depression and I haven’t experienced.

what other people have experienced in that realm of things, but it was a very sad and kind of down period of my life and what I tried to do to fix that, I thought that I needed to go out and find someone else to date, like where else do you meet people, who want to get in a relationship, right and this was the completely wrong approach, because I would go, number one, put myself in an environment where I was very unlikely to find people.

who had similar interest passions and values to what I had, but also I psyched myself out every single time I went into a bar or nightclub because I went there with the express purpose of finding somebody and that meant I put a ton of pressure and anxiety on myself. So don’t be a fool during your college career focus on your studies.

A LACK OF MY DILIGENCE:

Alright, the mistake is not doing my due diligence, when it came to the costs of college and this specifically refers to the costs of living on campus. So when I was researching what it would take to live on campus, because I wanted to live in the dorm, so I could meet as many people as possible and be as close to the opportunities as possible, the first bit of information I found on my college’s website is that I had to pay for the dorm upfront for an entire semester, which I believe was about $3500 every semester and I didn’t look passed that, I said okay, I don’t have $3500, so I went out and took out student loans to pay for it.

Only later in my college career, when I started to get to know the college’s website for a part-time job, that I’d been hired for I learned that there was a month-to-month payment option for that dorm.

So to give you some context, my original plan going into college was to get an apartment off campus, so I could pay for it month to month with my part-time job earnings, I didn’t have parents that could pay for my college, so I knew I would have to cover everything myself and I wanted to minimize debt.

but eventually, I decided against the apartment idea, because again, I wanted to be in the thick of things, I wanted to be on campus and meet as many people as possible, all that good stuff, but I didn’t do my due diligence, I didn’t learn about this month-to-month option especially if it’s going to involve you taking out a large student loan, dig in, ask questions, challenge your base assumptions and you might find something that could save you a lot of money.