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My Freshman Year: Memories of an Honor Student
I’ll be the first to admit that I was a big fish in a little pond in high school. My graduating class wasn’t that
big – there were only 175 of us. I graduated in the top ten; I was number six. Most of my friends were in
the top ten as well, and we were all fairly typical honor students. When it came to where we all decided to
go to college, I was the odd one out. Most of the rest went to either top-notch but small liberal arts schools
(those who didn’t want to get lost in the proverbial shuffle) or fairly local colleges (those who didn’t want
to have to transition too much in their lives as they tackled academic challenges).
I could have gone pretty much anywhere, I think, but I selected my university because it was the biggest
one I could find: UT Austin. It is the largest public university in the world; and that was exactly what I
wanted after being in a small pond for so long. I wanted to be another fish, swimming among so many
others, truly challenging myself. I believed that I was a good student – straight As were rarely a problem –
but my only measures were my peers (in a smallish school) and standardized tests. College would be my
real test, and while I felt confident, I also wanted to truly know if I was good enough.
The year I graduated from high school, my father retired from the Army and couldn’t take a civil service
job for a year. That meant that the family budget was a bit tight during the time I was starting college.
I had applied for and received a scholarship for my freshman year (renewable every year based on my
grades) that paid for tuition and books. What I failed to take into account when applying for admission and
planning was the cost of housing. By the time I really got things together with that application, the only
rooms left were far too expensive. The only other possibility was to live off-campus in an inexpensive
apartment. That was more than OK by me; it meant even more freedom. No worrying about a roommate,
no having to cope with the noise of other people…no problem!
What I didn’t really think through was that 1) I only had a bicycle, 2) I couldn’t afford much in the way
of furniture or niceties, and 3) I was lonely in a city where I knew NO ONE and lived alone off campus.
While I managed to bike to classes even in horrible rain and do the best I could without much furniture,
it was truly depressing to wake up some mornings and realize that no one knew me. No one around me
cared enough to ask how I was doing, and if I got sick, other than calling home, I just had to take care of
myself. That was a sobering realization and probably evened out the “freedom” and silence conducive to
studying that living alone off-campus gave me.
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, not even much of it, actually. When I saw the course catalog, I nearly
fainted with joy. I felt like a kid in a candy shop. There were so many amazing classes I could take! I
registered for 19 hours; Calculus (4 hours), Chemistry (3 hours), Engineering Physics (3 hours + 1 hour
lab), English (3 hours), and Latin (5 hours). My calculus class was mostly a waste; I learned early on
that the “lectures” were just reviews of the homework, and the professor didn’t even take attendance. I
quit going more than once a week when I figured that out because I didn’t need the reviews as long as I
did all the homework and practice problems in the book. My chemistry class was dull but gave us a ton
of homework, probably 1-1/2 hours per night, EVERY night. Engineering Physics was a great class, but
the professor was very old fashioned. Any time we used a formula on a test, we had to also DERIVE that
formula. This was great for learning but ended up being a killer, time-wise. That class also started at 7am
which was really hard lots of mornings as I was up doing homework until after midnight. English class
was awesome, and the books we read were great (lots of postmodern literary criticism – a whole new
world for me), but it took at least an hour every day. The Latin class was by far my favorite, and I ended
up making several friends in that course. But it was an absolute killer with homework. Not only did we
meet every day, Monday through Friday for class, but we had at least an hour of homework every night. I