Integration 2 James DeMaro Professor Drew Espeseth Moreau First Year Studies 30 November 2021 The Struggles of a Freshman Adjusting to college is full of many high and lows. While most people have become used to the daily routine of attending classes, taking midterms, and writing papers, it is impossible to say that anyone has fully adjusted. When a student leaves his home to attend university, he or she begins a completely new life. We leave behind our friends and family and are thrown into a completely new environment. While I have begun this adjustment process over the course of my first semester, I have asked myself many questions. How can I cope with leaving behind my lifelong friends? How can I become an important part of the new community around me? And finally, how do I cope with failure? Weeks 9 to 12 have helped me in the process of adjusting to this new step of my life by offering advice and even bringing attention to these new questions. Through the instruction of the Moreau program at Notre Dame, I have become aware of my surroundings in regards to community, learned how to adjust to my new environment, and learned how to prevail in the face of failure. One of the hardest parts of adjusting to college is leaving behind your friends and making new ones. Harder even still is the fact that new students often find themselves comparing their experiences to others on social media. While this process may be extremely difficult, Emery Bergmann, a student at Cornell University, shares her difficult experiences in an effort to help incoming freshmen. Bergmann offers her solution saying, “I had to minimize my time on social media. It became a platform for comparison. I evaluated every picture my friends posted, determining whether their college looked like more fun than mine, if they had made more friends than I had, just meaningless justifications for my unhappiness” (“Advice From a Formerly Lonely College Student” by Emery Bergmann - Moreau FYE Week Nine.) Within my own adjustment process, this has been one of the most difficult adjustments that I have had to make. During the beginning of my college experience, I often found myself comparing my experiences to others and thinking that my school just wasn’t as fun. This really hurt, because I felt as if I had worked so hard for this and I wasn’t having as good a time as other people. Bergmann helps to shed light on this problem by letting students know that everyone is going through this. As I began to limit my social media usage, I found myself comfortable at Notre Dame, and I began to enjoy myself even more. When I wasn’t comparing my experiences to others, I started to love mine even more. While I still have a long way to go on limiting my social media usage, I have grown to love and accept Notre Dame as my home. When a student leaves his home for college, they are dropped into a completely new environment. And with this new environment comes a new community. Within week 11, Parker J. Palmer explores how to find community within our lives. Palmer argues that, “Community begins not externally but in the recesses of the human heart. Long before community can be manifest in outward relationships, it must be present in the individual as “a capacity for connectedness”—a capacity to resist the forces of disconnection with which our culture and our psyches are riddled” (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at Community” by Parker J. Palmer - Moreau FYE Week Eleven.) In order to properly find community in our lives, we must have an internal movement within our hearts. During the Black Lives Movement, I made an effort to discover what was the key to building community. After reading the book “Tattoos on the Heart” by https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/well/family/advice-from-a-formerly-lonely-college-student.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/well/family/advice-from-a-formerly-lonely-college-student.html http://couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/13-ways-of-looking-at-community/ Father Greg Boyle,” I learned that we must first break down the barriers that separate us within our hearts. In order to break down these barriers, we must learn about other people and then come to know them. One of the largest barriers to building community is systemic racism (as we have seen in the past few years.) Christopher Devron speaks on the commonplace nature of these barriers saying, “By the standards of John Paul II and Francis, we can identify examples of structural or systemic racism throughout society at large” (“Should Catholic Schools Teach Critical Race Theory?” by Christopher Devron - Moreau FYE Week Ten.) I grew up on Long Island where racial injustice really isn’t a huge problem that we face. Nonetheless, during recent years I have taken it upon myself to become educated on social injustices that African Americans face. For my Eagle Scout project, I constructed a library in a temporary men’s homeless shelter. Instead of just collecting books for them to read, I filled the library with the works of many prominent African American and South American authors (these were the dominant ethnicities of the residents.) By encountering the residents of the homeless shelter I was able to establish community with them by breaking down the barriers that separated us. Failure is part of any college experience and learning how to properly deal with that failure can be a difficult process. Father James King offers up the idea that only Christ can save us and give us hope saying, “It was for Moreau “a treasure more valuable than gold and precious stones.” (CL, 34) In both light and shadow, the cross is Christ’s gift to us, our only hope” (“Hope- Holy Cross and Christian Education” by Father James King - Moreau FYE Week Twelve.) While it is true that Jesus can be our guiding light in terms of hardship, I don’t believe that we should place all of our trust in him and take no action ourselves. In my Accounting class, we had an extremely difficult exam. After taking the test I even called my mother to say that I didn’t think I belonged at Notre Dame and that I would be dropping out of the school of https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/06/03/critical-race-theory-catholic-high-schools-black-lives-matter-240792 https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/06/03/critical-race-theory-catholic-high-schools-black-lives-matter-240792 https://campusministry.nd.edu/assets/105621/ Business. After a little moment of panic, I decided that I would begin to work harder in order to achieve the grades that I wanted. And that’s what I began to do. Even though I had the flu the week before our next exam, I worked hard to understand the material, met with my professor, and completed practice tests. My results on this test were much more promising than the previous test and I felt accomplished in myself. While the transition to college can be extremely difficult, it’s a learning process for everyone. Things that we have believed our whole lives can be turned down in a second. Regardless of the difficulties, it’s important that we reach out to others, because everyone has gone through it.