Understanding Your Transition to University
"Young women and men arriving at college immediately confront a set of decisions. Which courses to choose? What subject to specialize in? What activities to join? How much to study? How to study? Such decisions are intensely personal. Often they are made with little information. Yet their consequences can be enormous. A subject that is bypassed, or study habits that are mismatched for certain classes, can result in limited options, reduced opportunities, or closed doors. Advisors play a critical role. They can ask a broad array of questions, and make a few suggestions, that can affect students in a profound and continuing way."
(p. 84, Making the Most of College, Richard J. Light, Harvard University)
Your transition to university involves significant changes on all dimensions of your life: academic, personal and social, and it must be understood that adjusting to these changes might take time. If you are facing difficultly adjusting academically or socially to LUMS, you must be patient and allow yourself time to grow into your new life at LUMS
Coming to university will be the biggest change that many of you have had to adjust to in your lives. For those of you who are living on campus, this will be the first time that you are living away from home, and you will have to learn to manage your academic, social and personal lives without the help of family and other support structures you have left behind. Although some students might cope very easily with these changes and challenges, others might face some difficulty and need some time to make adjustments.
Following are some of the challenges that freshmen might face:
Increased pace of academics: Students enter the LUMS Undergraduate program from a variety of academic backgrounds. However, the vast majority is either from the Pakistani Intermediate/Matriculation system or the British GCE Examination system. A few enter LUMS after having completed either the International Baccalaureate or the American High School curriculum (with Advanced Placement examinations). Students from the Intermediate or British GCE system are not used to being tested on their learning of subject matter on a regular weekly basis, since these educational systems test students with a final exam at the end of a 2 or 3 year period of preparation. Apart from this, university level courses usually cover material much faster than students are used to at school.
Increased Level of Academic difficulty: University level academics are not only faster, but often demand a greater depth of understanding and engagement with the subject matter from students. The material covered at university will often be conceptually more advanced and more challenging than students are used to at school level. Some students will naturally embrace this jump in difficulty level, while others will need more time to adjust, so that they can comprehend and apply the more advanced concepts.
Social Adjustment: When freshmen first come to LUMS, they are entering an entirely unfamiliar social environment, where they have yet to develop a social support system they can rely on. This is especially true for students who come to LUMS from outside Lahore. Also, generally speaking, university is a different social environment when compared to school. There is much greater cultural, geographical and social diversity of people that freshmen will meet when they first arrive, and this can be an overwhelming experience as they try to find their place here. This will be especially true for students who come to LUMS from schools where the student body was small, and they were part of a close-knit community where everybody knew one another. For such students, a place like LUMS can, at first, feel very impersonal and cold. Just like any other institution of higher education, LUMS has evolved a unique campus culture and student life experience. To some freshmen, the norms of the social culture at LUMS might seem strange and unusual. Freshmen who feel a sense of alienation at LUMS, and find it hard to connect with their peers here are at risk of feeling isolated, lonely and homesick. This impaired social adjustment adversely affects their ability to focus on their academics.
Increased Independence: Increased independence at university also brings with it greater responsibility towards self and others. Although many freshmen will continue to have the support of their parents and non-university friends when they come to LUMS, almost all of them will come here ready to enter into the first phase of adulthood; they will need to take greater responsibility for their academic success, decisions, actions and personal life. Students who are living away from home will need to take ownership for every aspect of their life here: academic, social, residential and personal. Students need time to adjust to this increased independence and personal responsibility, and each will have unique adjustment patterns and different adjustment times. While the ability to deal with this increased independence is an essential element of the personal development and maturation process during college, some |students will have trouble managing the greater freedom that university life offers. This may become evident when they fail to correctly prioritize the different aspects of their lives here. When that happens, time management suffers, and academic performance is affected.
From big fish in a little pond to small fish in a big pond: Most of the freshmen now entering the LUMS undergraduate program are amongst the most academically and non- academically accomplished students at their schools in Pakistan. This feeling of being special because of their achievements will be tested when those students come to LUMS and when they see that almost everyone here is either as accomplished as they are, and that there are some who have performed better than they did at school. Students are used to competing directly with other students in their school environment, because there are direct and well-defined measures of performance at school that can be used to rank students relative to each other. When they are no longer able to see themselves as "the best" in the diverse and multi-talented student body at LUMS, students will feel that their sense of self is being challenged. With new and unfamiliar standards to provide context to their achievements, they can lose a sense of where they stand relative to their peers, and thus that feeling of being "special" is challenged.
Once at university, students need to start seeing themselves as unique individuals with their own strengths and weaknesses. They need to learn to view their academic and non-academic achievements in a more personal context. College must be seen as an experience in personal growth, rather than a race to outdo one's peers. A student's CGPA does not necessarily make them more or less intelligent than other students, although there is no doubt that CGPA is a legitimate indicator of achievement in the classroom. However, it is only one indicator of achievement amongst a number of possible learning experiences that students can benefit from in college. Students must learn to make their college experience their own, rather than compare their achievements to others. Learning from the success of others and drawing inspiration from them is a mature and growth- oriented response to competition.
