What I Learned My Second Year of College

Once I finished my freshman year, I remember thinking I knew everything about college, proud to officially set myself above the crowd of incoming students who still didn’t know the right names for all the dorms. I was done with my days of getting lost on campus and accidentally dropping silverware in the dining halls. I was a sophomore, and everyone knows sophomores are basically pros at this whole college thing. But after another two semesters, I can look back on my second year and recognize everything new that I still learned about college, especially the lessons that snuck up on me.

Here are my top six tips for making the most of sophomore year.

1. What you need is in the library (and it’s probably free).

This is a lesson I learned only after I started working as a student assistant at my library’s help desk, but I made up for lost time by making sure everyone I knew was well aware of all the library has to offer. I don’t just mean books (although I’ll be the first to switch out a blurry PDF for the real deal). I mean everything. Need a charger for your laptop? Or your phone? Calculator? Camera? Need the camera itself for a video project, or a podcast microphone, or a ring light? Or maybe you need to watch a movie for class, but you can only rent it for 24 hours from Amazon. Go check yourself out a DVD and a DVD player and watch it as many times as you want right on your computer. I might be biased, but I can’t count all the times that I turned a twenty-dollar, weeklong problem into a free fix just by stopping at the help desk. Even if your library doesn’t have exactly what you’re looking for, they can point you in the direction of someone who does.

2. Putting in the hours doesn’t just apply to studying.

If joining new clubs is daunting as a freshman, it can feel even more awkward as a sophomore. I felt like I had lost the get-out-of-jail-free card of being new on campus, and it seemed like everyone was just wondering where I’d been last year and why I hadn’t tried to join earlier. It’s easy to give up on the first few awkward club meetings and start to claim you don’t have time for something new, but you shouldn’t. It turns out that the only solution for feeling awkward with a new group of people is simply spending more time with them. Go to that bonding event, and sign up for the club trip into the city. It took almost a semester for me to feel like I’d really made a connection, but that new club turned out to be one of my favorite groups of people.

3. You never know which class is going to be the best class yet.

Sure, everyone has to take classes that are simply for requirements and couldn’t be further from their interests. Just watch out for giving up on a class before you’ve even looked at the syllabus. I took a class this spring that I thought would just fill in a gap for my history major, but every new lecture made me more and more interested in it. I discovered connections to my other English classes, to my work with an on-campus magazine, and in my own writing. I would say it was one of the most influential classes I’ve ever taken at university, and I had only picked it because it fit in my schedule. It’s never going to be a bad choice to follow your interests when inspiration strikes, even if it doesn’t quite fit with the path you thought you were on.

4. How to deal with the worst neighbors ever.

At least at my school, sophomore year meant I got to choose my own roommate. Unfortunately, so did everyone else, and I ended up in the middle of a hall filled with what felt like the entire lacrosse team. They treated our floor like their locker room, which meant neighbors who left their clothes in the communal bathrooms, left their shoes in the hallway, and hogged the common room table playing loud poker games until late in the night. This doesn’t have a happy ending—my roommate and I remained constantly annoyed at our neighbors for the entire year we lived among them. My advice is more about not being afraid to call in a noise complaint at 2:00 a.m. on a Tuesday because there’s a game of Wiffle ball being played right outside your door. There are some things you just don’t have to put up with, and nearly getting smacked in the face by a Frisbee on your way to the bathroom is one of them.

5. You don’t have time for everything…

Even though tip two was all about spending time trying new things, in your second year of college, you start to realize that there just aren’t enough hours in the day for everything you want to do. You can join three new clubs, but you can’t be on the managing board of all of them. You can get a new job, but you can’t work every single day. For me, sophomore year was about learning that trying to do everything at once would mean I wasn’t giving my full attention to anything. Letting go of one of your freshman year dreams can be tough, but it’s worth it to make space in your schedule for what you really feel connected to.

6. …But you always have 15 minutes.

That being said, you have more time than you might think. Those 15 minutes between your classes could be spent staring at your phone, or you could do a little reading for class or grab coffee with a friend. With classes scattered throughout the day, you can fall into the hole of awkward unscheduled blocks of 15 or 20 minutes. Those weird little bits of time turn out to be perfectly shaped for drafting an email or watching a lecture video. You don’t need hours and hours to check off big tasks on your to-do list; you need 15 minutes to start step one.

It’s easy to see sophomore year as a filler year, after the stress of learning a whole new life in freshman year, but before the exciting parts of college like going abroad and senior grad parties. Instead of just writing it off, think of sophomore year as an opportunity. Another year to dig deeper into your world, move up from just a newbie to a real leader. And a chance to let go of the things that don’t matter anymore and put fresh energy into what you really care about. Just don’t let your new neighbors drive you insane first.

By Lucie Babcock, a rising junior at Tufts University, double majoring in English and history.