The transition from high school to college is difficult for everyone. The expectations are different, and the work is harder. You most likely don’t know any of your teachers or any of your classmates. You’re in a new environment, and you have to adapt quickly or you might not succeed as well as you want to.
For me, the transition was a little unique. I was homeschooled until my freshman year at NSU in 2013. My mom started homeschooling me when I was 5 years old, and she liked it so much that she continued to homeschool me until I graduated. My three younger sisters and two younger brothers are homeschooled also.
There are a lot of stereotypes about homeschoolers: that they’re socially awkward and have no friends, that they’re all religious nuts and that they never learn anything because their parents can just give them an “A” whether they do well or not. From personal experience, I can say that those stereotypes definitely fit some homeschoolers, but homeschoolers are just as diverse as public or private school students.
I’ve always had friends; I just didn’t go to school with them. In addition to math, science, reading and writing, my days as a homeschooler were filled with trips to the opera, RVing in national parks, community service with my 4-H group, orchestra practices, sports with other homeschoolers in a physical education co-op and gardening at museums, among many other things. I was able to experience learning in a way that would have been impossible if I had been in school for seven hours each weekday.
Before college, I didn’t know what a syllabus was, I had never sat through a class, I had never completed a group project for a grade, and I had never had to sacrifice my cherished eight hours of sleep for the sake of a test. Some adjustments I made when I started college were easy. For example, the work itself wasn’t too difficult because homeschooling had more than prepared me for college. The fact that I’m a commuter student meant another easy adjustment because I didn’t have to deal with the stress that comes from an entirely new social environment. Other adjustments, however, were more difficult.
I wasn’t used to a professor, someone I didn’t know at all, determining whether or not I would pass or fail a class. The most important ingredient of success wasn’t understanding the subject, but understanding my professor. During my first semester at NSU, I had an astronomy professor whose demeanor led me to assume that his tests would be easy. As a result, I didn’t prepare for his class as well as I could have, and I didn’t get the grade that I wanted. I used to be shy about approaching my professors. I felt like whenever I emailed them to ask them about an assignment that I was bothering them, but now I know that establishing relationships with professors as early as possible, especially with professors in my major, make the college experience a lot easier.
When I was homeschooled, I was allowed to work through a subject at my own pace. I had deadlines, of course, but they weren’t set in stone. College deadlines didn’t turn out to be as forgiving. Fortunately, I quickly fine-tuned my time management and planning skills and found a rhythm that worked for me. For example, as an English major, my classes require a lot of reading, and my professors often gave quizzes on the reading at every class. In order to do all of the reading, I had to read very quickly, and reading very quickly resulted in terrible reading comprehension and retention. I found that in order to pass the quizzes, I needed to read the assigned pages the day before the class or on the day of the class. I had to purposefully procrastinate on reading assignments, and I had to make myself start writing papers long before I felt that it was necessary.
Although homeschooling made the transition from high school to college harder, in some ways, it made it easier. After I got past one-plus-one-equals-two and dogs go woof, my parents weren’t much help. When I didn’t understand how to divide polynomials or how to write a good essay, I had to figure it out for myself from either the textbook or the Internet. This ability to think critically and self-teach became very useful in college; it made classes on subjects that were hard to grasp much easier, and it helped me get through classes taught by professors who weren’t very good at teaching.
I consider my evolution from homeschooled student to college student a success, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things I would do differently. During my freshman year, the extent of my involvement on campus was showing up for classes. I wasn’t used to having so many extracurricular activities at my disposal, and because I wasn’t used to them, I made the mistake of not taking advantage of them. Now, I wish that I had made more of an effort to look for student groups on campus to be part of. On the bright side, I do have two more years.
Overall, I believe that the challenges I faced entering college were unique, but they were no more formidable than the challenges facing any other college freshman, whether they graduated from public school, private school or homeschool. The key to my transition was simply hard work. Whether you’re learning at your kitchen table or in a classroom, there is simply no substitute for hard work.
PHOTO CREDIT: PHOTO PRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM G. DUCANIS
