Homesickness

At the start of college, many freshmen start to miss home, their families, friends, and the places they associate with their home, such as a favorite hangout spot. CNN.com published an article on their website about homesickness.

There are various ways to deal with homesickness. Here are a few:

1. Bring a few items from your old bedroom to make it feel like home faster. A few pictures of your friends and family are a good idea.
2. Adapt your old routines to fit with your new surroundings, such as going to church each week, or going to get a donut form a local bakery each Saturday morning.
3. Make friends and acquaintances to spend time with. Home is where you are surrounded by those you care about. Sounds cliche, but its true.
4. Find activities that you enjoy so you are not always thinking about home.
5. Call your family and friends from back home, but not too much. It may backfire and make you miss them even more.
6. Do not ignore your feelings. If you need to talk, talk. Do not deny yourself the right to feel your emotions. Overcrowding your schedule will not get rid of homesickness, but it could make it worse.
7. Recognize what is good about your new location, and get to know the area.
8. This is a good chance to go outside your comfort zone and try things you never thought about doing or never had the opportunity to do in high school. You may discover your passion, and no one can say stuff like, "I can't believe you're doing that!"
9. Be careful about comparing your new location to your old one. The new may come up short just because you are not used to it, even if you haven't given it a chance. Also avoid saying negative stuff to people you've just met. Some of them may be from the area or very attached to it and won't appreciate hearing things like, "I wish this place had a Trader Joe's, my old town did. My old town is so amazing!" It will come off as, "I hate this place, and everyone who likes it is an idiot."

College is a new experience and one of the benefits is that you are in a new place meeting new people. It can take some getting used to, so just give your school a chance.

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Don't Do Too Much

I saw a great piece of advice in my facebook news feed about how to be productive from Entrepreneur. However, when applied to college, this advice will not only make you more productive, it will also make you less stressed and therefore healthier. You might already know what it is, it's that simple: Do less.

While in school, we may be told the exact opposite. You have to have a job, an internship, and volunteer activities in order to be appealing to your future employers. But you also will need to take the toughest classes and ace them, meaning you must study at least two hours for everyone hour of class (please please please tell me I am not alone in never having done this in my life.) Then of course, there are the things you want to do, like go to the occaisonal party, go out to eat, join a few clubs, and date. Oh, don't forget to stay in shape by getting nine hours of sleep, planning all of your meals (at least three a day, with snacks in between, kids!) and exercising.

Well, some of that is easy. First, you will not want to be in as many clubs as you thought you wanted after you attend a few interest meetings, so don't worry too much about that. Most college kids only have three meals a day when they're home, and like that just fine. As for the exercising, combine it with something else, like walk to class or the store, or do some active volunteering. And just forget the nine hours of sleep, you will adapt to getting less. And there is no shame in taking one class a semester that you can pass simply by showing up and raising your hand from time to time. As for the rest of your classes, plan when you will take them in advance so you will never have a heart attack over the amount of work.

The fact of the matter is, some things you are told you must do while in school aren't all that necesary, so figure out what is really important, and what you want to put you soul into to get the best results.

Empathy is Dead.

According to a new study, we as modern-day college students have as much as 40% less empathy than our counterparts in the 80s and 90s. When I think about it, that may be true, but I don't think its necesarily that we care less.

I consider myself a pretty empathetic person. I feel bad when bad things happen, even if it is to bad people, or someone I don't know at all and I know other students, or recent students, who are similar but to a different degree. However, it doesn't get me all that far.

Think about when a society asks for donations, which is usually every day. Do we see the results of the donations we do make? Most likely all we see is the suffering continueing, or that same organization asking for even more money. Or we see just as valuable causes fall by the wayside for more popular one. And we've all witnessed administration get in the way.

When we try to be empathetic, is it returned? Or do we have poor empathy role models who show us that it is not worth the trouble?

So yeah, we're less empathetic than some former college students when they were our age. But maybe its because we had to enter the real world before graduation. After all, are working adults so much better?

Here is a link to the article and one psychiatrists theories about how it happened: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,593832,00.html