How Students Feel About Adapting to Life in College

Abstract

Every year, instructors in higher education meet a new contingent of students, including first-year students. Who are they? What is their perception of life in college? How do they get along in their interaction with each other? How do their attitudes and values change? The instructor has to be knowledgeable about all these things in order to choose the right style in relations with his charges from his very first meetings with them. Over the span of a decade and a half the author has been teaching a course in social psychology at the Moscow Institute of Physics Engineering (MFTI), and for the past two years a course for first-year students. This course is not one of the required ones. But the number of first-year students who have enrolled in it, attended the lectures, and taken the differentiated exam has, by the standards of the teaching of the humanities disciplines in this institution, been rather high: more man a hundred students. In satisfying students' desire to acquire a knowledge of applied psychology, I have made a practice of administering test essays on a number of topics, the most popular of which has been "A Psychological Analysis of the First Impressions of the Beginning College Student." In their essays, the young people share their impressions of entering an environment of interaction totally new to them; they describe the process of accommodation to the life of a college student, a life that does not resemble the one in which they acquired their primary socialization. Such an analysis serves as a first contemplation of the beginning of their independent life, with all its difficulties and contradictions, and for many it prompts their first self-analysis of their own personality. I submit that the opinion of first-year college students is of particular interest as well to my fellow teachers, in some way enriching their information about the spiritual world of the beginning college student. Let us take a more detailed look at what students themselves think about adapting to life in college.