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Finishing Up Another Chapter

Though the quarters seemed to have dragged by slowly, it appears as if the end of my first year was silently biding its time to pop up out of nowhere. I would be lying to you if I stated that my first year at UCI was a complete dream. But it’s not as if it was a nightmare.

So the good, the bad, and the somewhat okay.

Fall quarter Addie was a bit too ambitious… My idea of being successful in college was structured around three main goals: maintain a high GPA, avoid the classic freshman fifteen, and have a great social life. Well, I accomplished about 1 ½  of those benchmarks. I don’t have straight A’s. I’m still pretty socially awkward. But I had an adequately consistent gym schedule, three solid friendships, and while it’s too early to tell what the results from finals are, I’m somewhat confident that Math 2A will be the only class I’ll fail. Not exactly what I would picture as the definition of success at the beginning of the year, but something I would not write off as complete failure now at the end of spring quarter.

If I were to teach a class on being undeclared, I think I would want the curriculum to be structured around the topic of being okay with failure. I would want students to know that you’re not always going to get the outcomes that you desire throughout the quarter. And that’s completely fine. For my first midterm for Biology 94, I scored a 68%. I also was not successful in getting a writing class at all this year. However, those events still resulted in me getting a B for Biology 94 and taking Political Science 31A- two of what I consider to be some of my greatest accomplishments. Although I still have yet to kick my habit of procrastination and my work habits definitely could use some improvement, failing that one midterm taught me a bad grade does not signify the end of the world. Overall, actually understanding the material is more important than getting an A out of the class.

Moreover, not getting into your preferred major right away and being Undeclared is not a setback. At the start of the year, I thought I was certain I wanted to major in Nursing. I had an ideal schedule set for my first two years at UCI that was centered around taking mainly Biology and Chemistry courses with a few GE’s scattered here and there. After scheduling Fall classes during orientation, that plan was basically thrown out the window. When I decided to challenge myself winter quarter by taking 16 units, and the writing classes had filled up, I picked a random GE- Political Science 31A. Despite the fact I am more leaning towards the possibility of majoring in Public Health and the likelihood of taking another Political Science class is relatively low, that class with Professor Chambers remains as my favorite for this year. Fingers crossed for the possibility of still getting into UCI’s nursing program. But looking back now, I’m grateful I had the opportunity to be Undeclared my first year because if I weren’t, I probably would not have signed up for a class that interested me yet was unrelated to my major. So for those of you who were slightly disappointed of being Undeclared, instead of seeing it as a setback, view it as an opportunity to explore your options.

Furthermore, this year was not absent from struggles. But a few of my professors and ZotBlog were highlights that made those difficult moments less painful. I never fell asleep during Professor Chambers lectures; she always made the course material easy to understand and engaging. And Biology 93 with Professor Taagepera is probably the second hardest course I have taken so far after Math 2A. But even with such a heavy workload and challenging midterms and finals, she showed me you can still love a subject that you don’t always understand. To end, I would like to give a huge thank you to Lauren for allowing me to be a part of ZotBlog. My favorite aspect of being one of its writers is being allowed an opportunity to reflect on your prior experiences at UCI and also having a counselor and second-year students answer a never-ending list of your questions.

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Final Thoughts

I am not going to lie, but it feels like I graduated high school yesterday and here I am finishing my first year in college. So much has happened, so many new things I experienced that I never thought of. However, through all that experience, sometimes it’s easy to forget the main goals you want to accomplish by the end of the year. Coming into college, I had several goals I wanted to accomplish, but these three were my main ones:

1. Avoid Freshman Fifteen
2. Improve my social life
3. Maintain a good GPA

I knew coming into college that I would not be working out as much as I wish to, either it’s time, or due to my laziness to not work out. But one thing was sure was that I needed to not fall trap to the infamous Freshman fifteen. For those who don’t know Freshman Fifteen (FF), it’s basically when one gains an extra fifteen pounds by the end of freshmen year. In other words I needed to maintain my weight by not baiting myself to the junk food around me, or stress eating. However, I am a student, and therefore I had multiple occasions of stress eating (particularly around finals) and consuming fast food, particularly In-N-Out. Stressing about gaining weight while stress eating is not good for you, especially when it’s finals week, but I lived. I made it out while dodging Freshman Fifteen. Still I did gain a few pounds. Looking back, I was proud of myself for maintaining my weight, because my willpower against food is particularly weak, especially when I imagined I would eat a lot in college.

The second goal was to improve my social life, simply because I never really had one back in high school, and also because I was really shy. I wanted to be out there, rather than constantly spending time alone in my room binge watching netflix or playing video games. I was not planning to spend my time in college reliving my high school years with almost zero social life. To accomplish those goals, I approached a lot of people, and while I did not get along with over half of them, it was great, because I now have friends that I can hangout with rather than spending my weekend alone. People say that the friends you make in college usually are your true friends and in many ways more than one I agree with them. Now I don’t have that social life where I constantly go out during weekends, but it’s better than high school for sure.

My third goal is to maintain a good GPA. In high school, I never really worked too hard, and my GPA suffered the consequences. I started fall quarter with determination to keep a good GPA in college, especially since this is my first year and I don’t want to mess up. However, I stressed myself more about getting good grades and GPA than the actual class, I couldn’t really focus on understanding the material, and that was bad. Things took a bad turn as Spring quarter rolled by, because I was having a harder time focusing on my classes and those exam and midterm grades did not help me with my confidence. I know it’s not the best GPA right now, but I still have three years ahead of me, and I just need to work harder and smarter. The last thing I want in college is to repeat the same mistakes as in high school.

Not all is bad news, because a side achievement that I am happy about being undeclared is getting into ICS 31, because the demand for that class is really big. To get that class is basically first come first serve. I am not saying it’s impossible for an undeclared student to get that class, but I want to just advice that getting into ICS 31 (intro to programming) is difficult.

Throughout the year, I really appreciated applying to be a Zot Blogger, not because I can put this on my resume, but also because I was able to write blogs. I always loved writing in general, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, but being a Zot Blogger made me realize how much I love to blog, whether it’s about myself or just giving advice in general. Topics were great too, as I got to write about what UCI felt to me in many ways, from meeting new people, trying new experiences and more. This also gave me a chance to give me insight about myself too.

With all the knowledge I have accumulated over this past year, if I was to teach a class on being undeclared, I would structure it more interactive-based rather than lecture based. This class is not too difficult to comprehend, but it requires more time and experience. For example, I would start off by debunking the misconceptions of being undeclared and instead explain how one can get their major based on how hard they work. Being undeclared sometimes means taking GE’s and because they are first years, maybe recommending students to take these GE courses that fulfill two or more GE will also help. For example, I would highly recommend taking Anthropology 2A with Professor Egan for many reasons. His lectures are traditional-lecture based; professor speaks and you take notes. Professor Egan makes his lectures entertaining in a way it becomes easier to understand and remember (but you still have to take notes). However the content is really eye-opening, because all the topics are things not well known. For example, there are a group of people who in the Himalayas who practice fraternal polyandry (where a group of brothers all marry one wife), which keeps the population in check and results in no food shortage. There is more to this, but it becomes hard to explain unless you take the course.

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Look Back At It

As we all are approaching the end of our first year at college, it is just about time to reflect on what this year has been for us and me personally. In general, I really like reflecting on things that happen to me. I am also a big fan of self-analysis and improvement, and being able to reflect is an essential requirement to succeed in analyzing and improving yourself. I also like setting goals and making long-term plans. This helps me to make my reflection even more effective and informative.  At the beginning of the academic year, I set a goal to stay above 3.5 GPA, go to bed before 12 am, and eat more than one time a day. In general, I can say that I reached every goal that I set for myself, but if I look closely, it becomes clear that everything is not that perfect as it would seem from the first sight. While my GPA is above 3.5 and my sleep time is not always 12 am. And by not always I mean “pretty often.” I can definitely say that most of the time I do go to sleep at 12 am or earlier, but there are also times when it is way later than that. And the reason for that is pure procrastination. I still need to get better at time management and self-motivation. Regarding the food issue: I definitely started eating more, but it is still not enough. I don’t have a specific eating regime which is because I eat a lot of snacks or sandwiches during the day. So, you can see that really not all of my goals were reached properly, but this only means that I need to work harder. Nothing bad has happened and so there is no reason to panic. I really want everyone who will read this to have a similar approach to setting goals and reaching them. Trust me, this might be very useful and helpful during your first year in college.

Working on reaching goals was not my only duty this year. Being a part of ZOT Blog was among them too. I really enjoyed taking part in this and being a member of such a nice community if bloggers, interns, and Lauren. And it’s not just because I was getting additional units per quarter, but because of the precious experience that I acquired. I can say that writing blogs was a supplemental writing practice and also the place where I could use the writing skills that I acquired in composition classes.

Regarding the academics: I really like UCI. I also like most of the professors. And when saying “most,” I am not trying to say that some of the professors are bad. Every single professor that I had, no matter if liked them or not, was an expert in the field they were teaching. The only issue was that sometimes they just were not the best teachers. I don’t know if it was just them not trying hard enough or if it is really that they are not so good at teaching.  Though, I really want to take some time to express my appreciation to every professor that I had so far and that I will have in the future. I can see how hard that job is and I think there is no way an undergrad can blame a professor for not being either competent or just generally “good” at the subject they are teaching. I also encourage everyone who reads this to think the same and have the same attitude towards professors.

And finally, I want to address my “undeclaredness.” This year I was trying hard to get all the courses that I need for my major and finally, in Spring I was able to get a seat in the ICS 32! I was sure that I can do it and was just constantly trying hard to get into it. So now I am waiting for the final exam and then for my grade to be released so I can apply for Business Information Management major right away. I am really happy that everything turned out to be this way.  It is exactly how I wanted it to be and it is just another proof to the idea that being undeclared is not a bad thing but rather a good thing!