Join Malcolm, Kate and Marissa as they talk about adjusting to your first year of university. They discuss time management, healthy eating and their own university experiences including some tips and tricks that helped them succeed.
Join Malcolm, Kate and Marissa as they talk about adjusting to your first year of university. They discuss time management, healthy eating and their own university experiences including some tips and tricks that helped them succeed.
Hey folks, welcome back to the gate with the grove podcast. For those of you who are new to our podcast, my name is Malcolm and I am very excited to be staying with the podcast for the fall semester. Last episode, we said goodbye to Maddie and Zoho, who unfortunately can no longer be a part of our podcast. However, I am very excited to introduce you to the two newest members of our podcast, Kate and Marissa. Hey, guys, why don't you introduce yourselves?
Marissa:Hi, everyone. I'm Kate. I'm a youth ambassador at the Aaron site. And I'm in my third year studying psychology at UoG. And I also work at a bar downtown. So I'm always busy, but I love it. Hello, I'm Marissa. I'm a youth ambassador at the girl Fergus site, and I am in my third year of Psychology at the University of Guelph.
Malcolm:Thanks for joining the team,folks. This week's episode, we are going to be starting our new series about adjusting to life after high school, our very first episode of the series will be about settling into your first year of university where we will share some tips and tricks on how to be successful.
Kate:So first off, I want to talk about Residence Life and the adjustment from living at home with your parents to living basically by yourself or with someone else. So the first huge adjustment, I would say is meeting new people and meeting new friends, when you're just kind of thrown it into the environment. And you also have to adjust to sharing everything, and you're sharing your food, your plates, you don't even have your own room. And that can be a huge adjustment. And I think in simple ways to help with that is to have good communication with your roommates, and discuss the boundaries and expectations that you have with each other. And a whole new routine is going to be implemented for you and the roommate as well. You have to adjust to go into your classes. And if you want to go to the gym, you need to find time for that. And dining halls and eating when you have a class coming up. And finding enough time for all of that in such a great way for getting adjusted to living on campus is to understand the campus safety and police and as well as the mental health resources that are available to you if you ever need it. And that can just make you feel really comfortable on campus, you're able to walk around at night and feel like you are safe and secure. And we are so lucky that everyone has phones. And it's so easy to communicate with your family and friends from home. So that's such a great way to stay connected with everyone.
Malcolm:Yeah, we're super lucky to have Kate here because both Marissa and I didn't live in residence in our first year. So she's our she's our expert over here. So I wanted to just talk a little bit about keeping up with classes, when you first start with school classes can be a bit overwhelming. And I really benefited from creating a calendar with all my class times and upcoming projects. Did you folks have anything that kept you organized in your first year of university,
Marissa:I would say the most helpful thing for me was creating an assignment schedule. And then I just organized it by date. And it really helped me to kind of keep track of when I had to hand assignments in or which ones I should be prioritizing over the others that just kind of help take the stress off of my shoulders. When it came to due dates for all of my different classes.
Kate:I did a very similar thing, I made a spreadsheet. So at the beginning of the year, I just looked at all my syllabuses and put in every due date and organized it. So I knew exactly when everything would be done. And I crossed it off as I went.
Malcolm:Yeah, these are both great ideas. When you make it to university, you can find whatever helps you best. There's so many different ways to stay organized. And everyone can benefit from different forms of organization. So you find the way that works best for you. I'm sure some of you already have as we've already gotten into our first semester. So yeah. Although we are well, well past our first week of classes, something you can keep in mind for the winter semester is finding the rooms of all of your classes in advance. You don't want to be the person who's late to their first class because they couldn't find the classroom. I know from experience that I would occasionally leave for class very early, and I hadn't found the class beforehand. And I just would barely make it into my class on time because I'm frantically searching around these huge lecture halls trying to find which room I'm in. So there will be people you know who may not think it's important to attend all your classes, but I can say from experience that you will always do better and of course, if you go to class and stay caught up with your assignments and homework. If you are not careful, your work can really start to pile up and university is not as forgiving as high school when it comes to late submissions.
Marissa:So I definitely agree with not going to school part of university is super important. But for me what made it the easiest to maintain the stress of school was maintaining my life outside of school as well. Definitely learning how to balance school Life was social life. So with that comes a lot of time management, like we were talking about before, making a schedule of all your assignments is really helpful. So you can prioritize time for school, but also prioritize times for social experiences. I think it's really important to maintain a social life while you're in school, because it gives you that support system, it can help with a really stressful transitional time in your life. There's a lot of stress and anxiety. A lot of people can feel isolated during this time. And it just helps with your overall physical and mental health. If you're having experiences outside of doing school, attending classes and doing your assignments. So what about you folks? Did you find anything that kind of helped you balance your life? Or how did you maintain your social life? And how did that help you get through your first year?
Malcolm:Well, for me, I have a lot of friends who are from my basketball life and basketball team. And we'd like to just get together and play some recreational basketball every once in a while, get the blood pumping some exercise got to spend some time with my friends, that was an excellent way to get my mind off of classes, I always recommend exercise if you're trying to find a way to maintain your mental health outside of school. So I highly recommend finding a team or something and intramural anything when you are in your first or second year of university, because it can be super beneficial.
Kate:I lived with a girl from my high school and first year we were sharing the room. So it was really nice to have a friend there with me. And then we had a couple other friends who had come over all the time. So it was really nice that we were able to go to the library and study and finish all of our work, and then continue to be together and watch movies or anything when you were done with all of that. Yeah,
Marissa:amazing. That's great, especially for you Kate living on Rez. And it gets great to find people at your school or maybe joining sports or clubs that can help connect you with people at your school, especially a friends that you've had before have maybe gone to different universities. And I also think that this comes establishing boundaries. So accepting that when you're in university, you won't be able to socialize every day. And you do have to prioritize time for school. But on the other side of that, it's also important to understand when to give yourself a break from school. And when to know that your mind needs a rest from all the stress that school can cause. And then I think a big part of that also comes from nutrition as well.
Kate:Yeah, so definitely one of the biggest adjustments I found when I lived to residents was finding time to get food, and especially even just cooking simple things for myself. So luckily at University of Guelph, the campus has really nice food, and it's all really good. However, I know that's not the situation everywhere.
Malcolm:Definitely. We're very fortunate with that.
Kate:So it was very easy for us to go however, for I know Malcolm and Marissa who lived off campus for sere I imagine cooking for yourself was definitely a big adjustment. Yeah. So just learning even how to grocery shop completely for yourself. And now especially with groceries being so expensive, sometimes you need to find what's a cheaper option than what you're used to. Or if your parents bought you nice little treats you gotta sacrifice those or make little adjustments and I think a huge way to help with this is having quick and easy recipes on hand especially when I moved to my student house second year. I do not really like to cook so that was definitely a challenge for me. But just having simple things or cooking in large portions and then having leftovers is super easy. So I also want to know what staples Did you guys have and especially when you first went to university
Malcolm:Yeah, meal prepping is very important. I You mentioned earlier making big servings of food to last you ages. So I remember in my first few months of university, I would pretty regularly just make a huge pot of pasta, very simple takes like some pasta sauce, a couple of vegetables, throw in some meat. If you're not a vegetarian, you just make a big pot of pasta and I would have it I would freeze half of it. Keep the other half and I would eat it all throughout the week with other foods. Sometimes not always, but I did my best. But yeah, meal prepping, whether it be making several sandwiches for you to have at lunch every day. Meal prepping is very important and can be super helpful when you can find the time a bit later in the semester. So I recommend I made a lot of meals and I would freeze them. And when it came to midterm and final exam seasons, those were very helpful meals to have because I just be studying all day and I could just pull it out of the freezer, pop it in the microwave and I'd have a healthy home cooked meal. I do want to mention that when you first get to university you may not have the greatest amount of fun ans and a lot of people may be avoiding the more expensive foods. But it is so important to make sure that you're buying your fruits and vegetables, I know they can be really expensive, especially fruit, but try to find some big hit big heads of broccoli or cauliflower or things like that you can get for relatively cheap and they can last you a really long time, I really recommend getting vegetables into your diet, because a lot of people when they moved to university, they switched to a lot more of instant noodles and crafting or diet, which I'm not pointing fingers. I did that personally. But I just recommend finding other foods as well to keep yourself healthy.
Marissa:For me, I'm lucky to say that I lived at home with my family. So I honestly didn't have to cook too many meals for myself, I have a wonderful mom that still cooks me meals. But I know that definitely isn't the case for everybody. So like Malcolm said, meal prepping is a great way to make sure that you have meals throughout the week and not have to worry about what you're eating while also worrying about school and getting your assignments and attending classes. So that's a really great strategy as well. And like Kate and Malcolm both said, with grocery prices being super high, some of things that you need are very unaffordable. So always check about resources and services within your community. I know that the service isn't available to everybody. But for those folks at the University of Guelph, just to plug ourselves here, I think we do have free food available to anyone who wants to come in. Or we can also connect you to services where you can get frozen meals that you can take us throughout the week as
Malcolm:Yeah, definitely come on by to our site, we have all sorts of food here. If you're ever feeling hungry, and you don't think you can afford meals for the week, just come and spend lunch at the grove and feel free to grab a snack we can, we're happily going to be willing to make you proper lunches as well. So
Kate:then I think another little hack for getting your fruits and veggies is to buy frozen. Yeah, because they pick all of those things, right? So frozen vegetables might be then what you find in the produce aisle, and then also really want to talk about just buying for yourself and learning the nutrition. I remember, when I first moved by myself, I bought way too much food because I thought I would eat it all and then the produce went bad. And it just sat in my fridge for forever.
Malcolm:So I'll pose one last question to the group. So what do we think is for each of us the most different experience that we got when we transition from high school to university,
Kate:I would say overall just being completely on my own. I'm very lucky that back home, my mom was stay at home mom, so our house is clean off and she would cook a lot. So being by myself, and having to manage myself and completely take care of myself without anyone's help was definitely a huge adjustment just overall.
Marissa:Yeah, similar to k, I think you just get a newfound feeling of independence when you go to university, whether you live on res or you're still staying at home, because it kind of allows you to take control of how you learn. It's not so much controlled in a classroom, say as high school, you're really kind of in charge of if you're going to classes when and if you're doing your assignments. So it's just a big point of accountability on your own self to take control of your learning. What about you, Malcolm?
Malcolm:Well, I would say that one thing that was really, I was expecting it when I came to university, but the class size is being so large, it was a big change from high school when you were in these groups of Max 15 students. So you have a lot more of a disconnect from you and your professors. So you have to you have to really account for that when you're getting ready for your courses. Because like back in high school, I had like a connection to each of my professors, which would help me be able to if I had a question I could learn from them. And all the professors at the university are amazing at reaching out but it is very difficult for them to reach out to their hundreds of students. So you will will often be connected to a TA if you have questions within the TAs are also amazing. I'm not complaining about them. But yeah, it's a big difference from the high schools setting. The classrooms Definitely.
Marissa:Thank you everyone for tuning into this week's podcast and remember to be kind to your mind and we'll see you next time.
Malcolm:Bye