Sophomore Year Reflections

10 min readMay 31, 2019

Me: “I‘m not managing my time very well’.”
Literally everyone I talk to: “I think you’re doing too much.”

Alas, sophomore year has passed. What seemed like two excruciatingly long and arduous semesters have flown by, and in the blink of an eye, I am halfway through college — it’s a terrifying thought.

I started sophomore year fairly optimistic. After spending an academic year and a summer in Ithaca, I knew my way around campus, and I had done well in my classes freshman year; I thought I would be able to get through classes, add on a few more clubs, and be just fine. Boy, was I wrong.

Barely a month in, I was very behind on work and incredibly overwhelmed. Everything I was learning in my classes was completely new to me, and I was not handling the work load well while also trying to juggle rushing APO, staying in four other clubs, and continuing with my summer internship. My life felt like a game of bubble shooter that had reached that near-death point where all the bubbles are near the bottom of the screen and I was panicking, scrambling to keep clearing away bubbles and keep the game alive.

If you had asked me how I was doing during first semester, and I was being absolutely honest, I probably would have said I was pretty miserable. I was burnt out by fall break, but I was too stubborn to quit anything, so in misery I remained. Half of me wanted the semester to just be over, while the other wished I could press a restart button and fix everything I had done wrong. I felt a bit more prepared to finish off the fall semester after starting therapy and seeing my high school friends during Thanksgiving, and the spring semester went by a bit more smoothly in terms of time management, but not quite smooth enough.

Second semester started with existential crises over my major, which then morphed into existential crises over my career path. When it felt like I had gotten one part of my life together, another was falling apart again. I felt like I was simultaneously doing too much and not enough, that I was doing everything wrong. After five years of being in an intensive academic environment, I felt that I should have been able to manage my time well, but I couldn’t, and I felt broken for not getting things done productively or effectively like everyone else seemed to be doing.

If I were to be the same cynical and constantly complaining person I am during the stress of the school year, I would say that the year has been a series of poor decisions, perpetual disappointments, and unfortunate mistakes. But I wouldn’t be giving myself enough credit for how far I’ve come and how much I’ve grown, and I certainly wouldn’t be giving enough credit to the people who have supported me and helped me get through the last two years. Despite the stress and misery that hovered over my head on a daily basis, I found peace in the small moments of success and the new connections I made with people, even though, in the grand scheme of things, it felt like everything was falling apart.

Whether I’m writing this more for myself, or to continue what I started last year, I’m not sure, but I hope it’ll help everyone who reads this in some way. I think a lot of what I have to say this year echoes what I learned last year, particularly learning to define and trust myself and learning how to prioritize so I can preserve some of my sanity. But a lot has also changed, especially in regards to how I navigate social situations and view friendships.

So here are some lessons I learned during my sophomore year of college.

1. “The Right Thing” for everyone else may be completely different from “The Right Thing for You.”

As I mentioned earlier, I spent most of the year feeling like I wasn’t living my life like I should be. Between not managing my time or workload well and (over)committing to clubs that were not related to academics or career development, I began to question whether I was truly invested in my major or academics. Am I made to be an engineer if I put so much of my time into the arts? I wondered if I was just broken for not being able to live my life at the maximum productivity levels that society says we should be living at. Ultimately, I thought that what everyone else was doing and how they were doing it was the best way to do things.

It was my therapist who got me to fully recognize and accept that it’s okay if I don’t do things like everyone else. Additionally, what my friends and family think is the right thing for me to do is not always what is actually the right thing for me to do. I am not built to function like everyone else and I have to work with what I have. It may not be objectively the best way, but it is the best way for me, and that’s what should matter. If that means not being a morning person, that’s fine. If that means I need to sit with friends in order to feel motivated to work productively, that’s fine. If that means not going on co-op even though it will probably benefit me in the long run, that’s fine. I trust the opinions of my family and friends, but I also must learn to trust myself and choose what I think is best for me, not what will appease other people.

2. Learn how to prioritize and when to say “good enough.”

Ask any of my friends or family members and they’ll tell you that I am a perfectionist. If that weren’t bad enough, I also do everything very slowly. This year proved that being a constant perfectionist is a highly unsustainable way of life, and I had to learn how to better prioritize my work and when to give up and accept that whatever I had been able to do was good enough. That doesn’t mean I didn’t still spend plenty of nights staying up scrambling to get work done, but I learned to accept that I couldn’t possibly solve every problem on my problem sets correctly or thoroughly read through readings for my liberal studies. I had to accept that I can’t get all of my work done, study for prelims, AND attend every scheduled club meeting. School is my first priority, and if that means skipping one day of dance practice or another week of ukulele, then so be it.

My perfectionist heart may weep, my mind may wonder what I’m missing in all those club meetings, and my pride may take a hit when my grades are lower than I’d like them to be. But as long as I have a strong enough understanding of what I’m learning in school, can show that I have a decent grasp of the concepts on my problem sets, and can maybe get a bit more sleep to stay relatively sane, I guess it’ll be worth it.

3. Finding your people takes time.

If you read my freshman year reflection, you’ll know how I lamented over not finding a group of close friends last year. I still haven’t found a group quite like my high school squad, but I have found close individual friends, both from the people I met last year and the ones I have met this year in classes and clubs, and I am grateful to them for making all those dreary Ithaca days so much brighter.

Part of me still misses having a squad. Whenever I see how my friends at Cornell have their own large groups of friends, the insecure part of me wonders if we are truly friends. But then I remind myself that not all friendships function the same way, that every relationship I have with someone is slightly different. I have my own role in my friends’ lives, and their other friends have their own respective roles as well.

And there’s still time to meet new people, and there are many people that I have met that I would like to get to know better. As the last two years have proved, it takes time to find the people that completely get me. Not everyone I meet will have the same idea of “fun” or share the same values as I do, but I shouldn’t let them sway me into deviating from values I want to uphold just to be closer to them. There are other people out there who respect and share my values; I’ll just have to wait until I find them, even if it is during the last month of college. Sometimes, friendship just works in funny ways.

4. Therapy is helpful.

I’ve debated talking about this so publicly, but if I don’t how else are we going to get rid of the mental health stigma, right?

If I remember correctly, I started therapy in November mostly at the insistence of my sister. I was feeling utterly overwhelmed and burnt out by school, and we thought it’d be good to make sure I got the help I needed in the case that I was actually clinically depressed. (I’m fine. Relatively.) I think I had first gone with the intention of getting help on how to better manage my workload and my anxiety, but we ended up focusing first on my struggles with my identity in relation to meeting new people.

It started my last two years of middle school. Long story short, I had a falling out with my middle school friends, and I came out of it with a subconscious belief that I was boring. It became the basis of my self-image, and I did not realize how much space this belief took up in my daily life until I came to college and could not meet anyone new without being totally preoccupied with thoughts like, “Will they think I’m boring once they find out I’m usually a quiet person?” I logically knew I wasn’t “boring,” but the memory of being called that was too ingrained in my mind for logic to matter when I was actually talking to new people.

My therapist suggested we try a session of a psychotherapy treatment called EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. I was skeptical of its effectiveness at first, but as I sat there in her office on the last day of finals of the fall semester, going through my traumatic memory and telling my eighth grade self whatever I needed to hear to undo the damage that led to defining myself as boring, I could literally feel my brain getting hacked. Despite the fact that it was only one session, the traumatic memory no longer felt like a constant weight in my chest, and I left feeling liberated.

I was scared the effects wouldn’t stick. Unhelpful thoughts of “people don’t like me” and “I don’t belong here” will still sneak into my head some days, but over five months later I am happy and relieved to say that that memory of being called boring by my middle school classmates no longer defines me in my mind.

Aside from that one session of EMDR, the rest have mainly involved talking about my life and things that have been bothering me, be it academics, relationships, time management, or my existential crises over potential career paths. It’s nice talking to someone with an outside perspective and hearing a voice of reason from someone who isn’t so entangled in the intricacies of how my life works in relation to my family and friends and academics. My therapist just focuses on me and pushes me to deepen my understanding of myself, of what I want, of what I need, of how I function best, separate from the influences of expectations set by my family and society. Sometimes the things she says are things I have heard before, or they’re things that sound like common sense, or they’re logical conclusions that have crossed my mind in the past, but it’s grounding to have her there to remind me of these truths, to validate my sentiments and experiences, to help me not pass judgement on myself when things don’t work out how I thought they would, and to provide a perspective that is just different from those that I encounter in the people I normally talk to.

It was kind of scary reaching out for help, but I have no doubt in my mind that going to therapy has been one of the best decisions I have made for myself.

5. Changes takes time and effort to stick.

I know this logically, but I don’t think I’ve ever really tried to instigate a major change in my lifestyle to truly understand this fact. Given how much I was struggling last year though, I kind of have to do something to make sure I don’t go absolutely insane the next few years. Be it learning to not be a perfectionist on all my assignments, implementing a bedtime routine so my anxieties don’t manifest themselves in my dreams, or trying to find something I like doing to get myself into better shape, it will take time to figure out what works for me, and even more time to see the effects of my efforts.

I often feel like I am incapable of changing, especially when I am able to reach my goals one day and then fail to do so the next. But I want to believe the small and inconsistent changes are still worth something. I just need to keep pushing, remember that it’s normal to not succeed every day, and remind myself that it will be worth it in the end.

Some of my friends have said that I have “dope music taste,” so if you’re interested, here are a few songs that got me through the year: