How do you actually thrive in freshman year?
Go to office hours before you need to. Join two things and quit one. Learn where the help is located before something goes wrong. Nearly everyone feels like the mistake in the admissions office for the first few weeks, and the students who settle fastest are usually the ones who say so out loud.
The first six weeks are misleading
Everyone looks like they have found their people and nobody has. Friendships formed in week one often dissolve by October, which is normal and not a failure. Judging your college experience by the first month is like judging a book by its acknowledgements.
The habits that matter most
- Office hours. Mostly empty, and the single highest-return hour a student can spend. Go early, when nothing is wrong.
- Two commitments, not six. Depth builds friendships; breadth builds a calendar full of acquaintances.
- Find the support offices in September. Tutoring, counseling, disability services, financial aid. Knowing where they are before a crisis changes what happens during one.
- Sleep. Unglamorous and the strongest single predictor of a bad first semester when it goes.
For parents
Expect the distress call, and expect it to be resolved by the time you have finished worrying about it. Students often use home as the place to unload the worst of a week, which means parents receive a systematically skewed sample. Ask questions rather than solving, and resist calling the university unless there is a genuine safety issue.
If it is genuinely wrong
Give it two semesters if you safely can, because most first-year misery is transition rather than mismatch. If it persists past that, transferring is a normal thing that many students do, not an admission of defeat.