> I'm scared to death. In 4 months, I'll be officially a senior. In 7 months, my brother will be gone forever (except for vacations). In a year, I'll know what college I'm going to go to (probably... I'll at least know which I want to go to). In a year and seven months, I'll be gone forever. I'll have to move hundreds of miles away, and make new friends, and deal with schoolwork without my parents on my back, and after that get a apartment and a job.... This is the first time that the fact that I'm growing up and everything will change has hit me. I'm not upset about getting out of High School or DC, but this is the first year I've really been happy with my life. I'm finally over the teenage "I'm ugly and fat" thing (although that won't change in college, probably).... actually, I guess it's the fact that this is the first year that I've had really good friends who believe the same stuff as me who I can talk to about anything... and the thought that I'll lose touch with many of them and have to leave them just hurts a lot.... I'm scared to death. I don't want my childhood to end. I don't want these 17 years to be all I have with my family. I don't want anything to change. How do you guys deal with it? Those of you in high school, how do you deal with knowing you have to leave? If you're in college, how'd you deal with leaving? If you're past that, what little tidbits of wisdom do you have for a teenager who is scared of the Real World?
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> Well, at least I'll have you guys.... you'll still be here, waiting for me at my computer, right?
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> uni"i feel like i'm writing a Dear Abby letter"peg



I don't know whether my story will help you, because my attitude senior year was quite different from yours. I couldn't wait to get away from home. I lived in a city that had been prosperous in the thirties, but had gone downhill from there. My mother (who has had trouble getting her life together since the divorce) was severely getting on my nerves. I had a couple very good friends (who I am still in regular contact with) but most of my classmates seemed so shallow to me, so worried about things that didn't really matter. I was noticing that the most popular students from the previous class, who had been so dependent on their status in our town and our small school, were dropping out of the big-name schools they had been accepted to and were back living with their parents and going to local schools.
I was accepted to a school in Columbus, the very model of the kind of big-city environment I longed for. I worked all summer for money for books (and didn't end up saving a penny of it) and spent lots of time with my boyfriend and my best friends from high school. When the day came and I packed my mom's station wagon with all my worldly possessions and the computer my dad had built me, except for the fear of not making any friends, I couldn't have been more ready. A week of freshman orientation kept us too busy to get homesick, and before we knew it the semester schedule was well under way. As I think someone mentioned before this post, when you're a freshman in college, *everybody* is new. There aren't already-established cliques like there were in high school, except maybe for the athletes who had already been on campus training for a month. I decided, for the purposes of adjusting, I would pick one organization for the first semester and join others later (it's very easy to do this in college and now I am in a couple more). So by this time I had friends from my orientation group, friends from my residence hall, and now I was making friends in LGBA. You'll be amazed how fast the friends pile up. Now I have so many that between studies and work, I don't have time to spend with all of them.
Since the school is only 45 minutes from home, I go back often, probably once or twice a month. I have a much better relationship with my mother now that I don't live with her. I feel freer to tell her things I would never have told her last year. I'm not in fierce competition with my sister anymore. in fact, she's coming up to spend this weekend with me. My relationship with my boyfriend has had trials and grown stronger because of this slight separation. We keep in touch online and on the phone and on most weekends he drives here to see me.
I did, however, have one big lesson to learn. In high school, I never had to study much outside of class. The most I remember ever studying for anything was a half hour. I graduated with a 3.5 GPA. I figured college couldn't be too much harder.
However, in my particular case, it was. Now I know this is different for everyone. I have friends here who always studied for hours all the way through high school and college is a piece of cake for them. As I'm sure you've been told over and over, the structure of college classes is quite different from high school. I have four classes ( I had five first semester). I attend them three days a week, for an hour each. But for every hour I spend in class, I need to spend at least another hour or two reading or writing or researching for it. It was tough for me to learn that fact: my GPA first semester was 1.4.
But another great thing about college is they *want* you to do good. If you don't graduate, you won't become a rich alumnus and build things for them. This semester I got off to a very good start. I am in a program where I meet with an advisor every so often and he checks on my progress. If I start slipping, he's there to catch me. And I can get free tutoring in any subject. In addition, I met with the dean on her request and we discussed how I can keep my scholarships (some of which require a certain GPA). I am confident that my grades will be greatly improved this semester, but in the case that they're not quite high enough, the dean can and will petition for a second chance.
Moral of the story: Chances are, the things you're not worried about at all right now are going to be the things you have trouble with. But in the long run, none of this is important.

Rhi"I hope unipeg can find something valuable in my ramblings"annon