My Biggest Regret in University
--
In April of this year, I will finally be graduating University. As I am not pursuing a Master’s, PhD, or heading into law school of any kind, this is going to be the last time that I am in an education institution for the foreseeable future.
With my graduation coming up, I’ve been thinking a lot about the last four years of my life, how I have spent them, all the fun times that I have had, all the low times that I have had, and things that I wish I had done differently.
While I am overall very happy with the time that I have had in University, and I definitely think that I am a different person from when I started to where I am now, but there is one thing that I wish I had done from the very start, and this is now my number one advice for anyone who is entering post-secondary education.
When I entered University, I was lucky enough to go with a lot of friends from my high school. It was comforting knowing that I have people that I know around me, and I was even roommates with one of them. I had a great group of friends, and it was this comfort that led to the biggest regret.
I got comfortable with those around me, those I had known for years, that my first year in University, I didn’t really make any new friends. I didn’t go out to social events, that were happening in my program which would have been the perfect opportunity to meet people and I always sat by myself in class, and I just made peace with the people that were in my life. Even though I started in September, I think I made one friend, and that was in January.
However, this was the choice that I made myself. All of my other friends from high school were branching out and meeting new people, so as time went by, I would spend more and more nights alone since others were off having a great time with their friends.
Flash forward to today, I am not really close to anyone who I was friends with in high school, and my best friend is someone I met who was in my program. To think that we could have met sooner and had other memories all the way back in first year, I wish I had those memories, but because I was in my comfort zone, either choosing to hang out with my current friends, or just be alone (which I was most of the time), we met a year later instead.
