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Worry less about grades, and more about learning.
One of my teachers once told me, “I wish I had failed more classes in college.” I thought he was crazy. I was a straight A student in high school, and over four years of education in a pretty demanding program, I’ll be leaving RIT with a 3.99 GPA. The thought of failing a class was ludicrous and anxiety-inducing.
What I know now is that this GPA means that I kept my scholarship, but not much else.
Many programs at RIT are built around the concept that you get back what you put in. And while I have learned a great deal and am more prepared for the “real world” than many hundreds of graduates from across the country, I think I honestly could have pushed myself more if the thought of getting A’s wasn’t looming before me. The grading system held me back, and I took fewer risks in my work. Only in the beginning of my senior year did I really stop caring about what my report card said, and instead focused on challenging myself and the work that I produced. The same professor said, “if there’s a huge hole in the ground that you can’t cross, keep failing. Eventually you can take those failures, fill up the hole, and walk across it.”
He’s a bit strange, but very right. -
Play Humans vs. Zombies during my first semester.
HvZ is a huge part of RIT culture. For those not in-the-know, it is basically a week-long game of tag, where students play the part of survivors in a zombie apocalypse. You spend a week avoiding being tagged, and if you survive you get bragging rights for a year.
While it may seem silly, I really wish I had played it. Not only do you have the opportunity to meet close to 1,000 other players, you get to know the campus really, really well. As a human player, you cannot be tagged inside. Therefore, you get to know the tunnels, the bridges, and the roads of campus within the first semester of being here. Plus, you have an excuse as an eighteen year-old to run around with Nerf blasters trying to tag your friends. -
Go rock climbing.
RIT has an amazing rock climbing facility and classes that you can take to learn how to use it. I live about a five minute walk from the Red Barn, and yet I’ve never gone. They even make it simple, and offer free-climb days throughout the semester. There’s so much to do on campus that it can be really easy to overlook some of the things that are quite literally right in your own backyard. -
Go to more hockey games.
Anybody who knows me may think this is a crazy addition to the list. In my senior year I’ve attended every home game and several away games for both the men’s and women’s RIT hockey teams, but I honestly wish I had done it sooner. Not only have I met some amazing student athletes who balance a rigorous academic workload with a demanding DI conference, I’ve met fans who are more dedicated to this team than almost any other college hockey community. It’s also a community we can be proud of; in the past few years, the teams have raised over $50,000 for different charities, and that’s not counting the fundraiser that will take place in early February. Not only is it a great way to relax at the end of the week, its a great way to meet lots of people that are really, really passionate about RIT.
Plus, the games are wildly fun, and really inexpensive (sometimes free!) for students. -
Join a club.
Last on the list is something I could have done at Freshman orientation: join a club. I’ve been to a few meetings of the juggling club (which I highly recommend), and I was one of the first members of the RIT Ukulele club. Unfortunately, schoolwork and other commitments required me to stop attending both, and eventually I would become the president of the Illustration Guild, the club dedicated to my major.
I really wish I had made the time to join a club, not as a member of the e-board, but just as a member. To let someone else run things and just enjoy being around other people who like table-top games, knitting, or hiking. Joining a club is one of the easiest ways to meet people, and takes almost no commitment or planning on the part of the members, other than showing up for an hour a week.
Plus, I mean, we have more than 200 clubs on campus. Come on. What was I thinking?
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5 Things I Would Do if I Could Do it All Again
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