College Questions.

Ok so since I've basically raised my self my entire high school life, and I'll be the first in my family to go to college, I know nothing of what it is like. I come to you, SouthPerry, to answer my questions regarding going to college, university to be specific. A little info on my self, I'm going to the Univesity of Hawaiii @ Manoa and will be pursuing a major in Korean or Chinese and hope to get study abroad my last two years and then go into teaching ESL or something in that field. Not worth the huge amount of debt I'll be in, but I've got one life so I'll live it.

1 - How did college move in work for you? The process I assume I'm going to follow is to fly there a day before move in, try to buy all the college supplies that aren't huge on the mainland, then move in. My mother said she'll try to go with me, but money is an issue with that extra plane ticket.


Got there 1 day beforehand. Check in with the dorm peoples. Got my assigned room key. (I knew which room I'd be staying in ahead of time of course). Placed anything I brought with me in my room. Waited for roommate. Said, "hey" and gave a small wave. Discussed how we would move the preassigned beds/furniture around so that the room didn't look crappy. Relaxed for an hour or two. Meeting with the residence people. Slept because classes started the next day T.T


2 - When it comes to laptops, what the pineapple do I need to be looking for? I will be getting a new one, and I want to make sure it can handle my koreagames, but what should I look into for school work?

Anything decent enough to play games will be fine for school work. You'll probably want to worry more about software than hardware.


3 - I've heard that first year will be just like high school, full of nothing but core classes. Does this mean I can't take a language? I know that my Uni has it's own list of requirements for graduation and moving up in rank but aside from that what have you had to do?

Depends from school to school of course.
My case:
We're given a list of Core requirements and Major requirements we have to take. We have a course catalogue that details which classes count for what. I checked to see if any classes sounded interesting to take in the list. Made a list of a few possible courses I could take. 1 Major class and 3 core classes taken 1st quarter of the school year. Switched to 2 and 2 then to 3 and 1. Then started taking whatever the hell I wanted since I mostly finished both. Depending on your Major, you may not have to take too many classes, or some classes will count towards both your Major and Core classes. So unless you're in a tough workload Major (like engineering) you'll have plenty of time to take core.

You CAN ask for help from the counselors. Despite some people's obvious bias against them, they do NOT all suck. You can easily go find out if they do suck or not. Go talk to one, ask em questions, you'll be able to tell from how they answer if they actually know what they're saying or not. If they have to consult the guidebook this isn't a bad thing. It's not like they know everything off of the top of their heads. But if they can't tell what the guidebook is trying to tell em.... then you might have a problem.


4 - Living with a room mate, what is it like? I am so blessed that my Uni has a service for LGBT students to help get them situated where as they aren't placed with homophobic/problematic room mates but I haven't lived with someone for the past three years. My father does come home, but we don't interact. I prefer to be alone, is it wrong that I want to try and get a single dorm room?

Had slight trouble with a messy roommate my freshman year. We were mostly cool about it though. Ask him to clean up a bit when things got too messy. He was cool with it. We're both pretty mellow people. And pretty much, so long as you don't completely freak out about every little problem you'll be fine. There's gonna have to be some things you let slide, but this doesn't imply you let them get away with doing bad things to you or in general. Tend not to pry/ask too much on random roommates. We're roommates not friends. If eventually you become friends with your roommate (I did), then do as you feel the roommate would be comfortable with.

It isn't wrong to want to live in a single. I lived in a single my entire 2nd year. But you should give living with a roommate a chance.


5 - Using the pineappleing bathroom, and taking a god damn shower. This is what I worry the most about, I'm like a teenage girl when it comes to my body. I'm so insecure. I assume I'll probably have to use a public shower, but how does one cope with that? I generally have stomach issues with anything I eat, and therefore find myself best friends with the toilet late at night, should I try and request a dorm with a private restroom?

Bathroom/shower locations vary depending on the dorms at my school. The more expensive dorms that have suite style apartments have a bathroom/shower shared by 4 "mini apartments". It's like an apartment of houses basically. One of those suites has 4 rooms in it and they all get to share 1 bathroom/shower.

The less expensive dorms here have a community bathroom/shower per gender per floor. You're bound to see a person or too walking back from the showers in just a towel. It's pretty normal here. There are those who take all of their clothes with them too though and come back fully dressed. We've got a bit of everything.


6 - Having a job on campus, should I try for it? I'm going to need to get all the money I can take, be it from grants/scholarships/loans. A job would make things better, and give me some spending money however is it really worth it?

Having spare money is definitely worth it. If you can avoid it during your first set of classes it would be great though. Take the time to adjust to the school first and get more familiar with the place. Get to know people first. If you spend too much time working, and not enough time meeting people... well... I'm personally glad I took the opportunity to meet people. Met plenty of pimentos but met plenty of great people too. More pimentos than great people, but I'd gladly suffer through the pimentos again for those great friends I got to meet.



I can't really think of any more right now, and I know these questions are typical but I've got no one to turn to. I've only got a little more than three months to go until I'm done with High School. I'm so scared to go to college, to grow up, to be in so much debt. But at the same time, I'm ready to get away.

Answers to specific questions found above in bold. Also:


Things to buy right away:
Paper and Pencils/Pens and perhaps notebooks. A backpack if you dont have one. A laptop. Clothes/accessories for the local weather (ie Umbrella if it tends to rain)
Some dishes/cups (microwaveable preferably and reusable) - Get em at target or something, I bought mine for cheap there. You might end up having cereal for breakfast quite a bit depending on how rushed you are. Or you might just want to end up eating something simple in your room that you can microwave. You can have the utensils be disposable if you want.



Things to wait til you discuss/see what your roommate has:
A TV (my roommate brought his HDTV with him and his fridge, so we just shared that).
A fridge (see above)
A Microwave (in return I bought and shared use of my microwave)


Things to not buy until later when you're sure you'll need it and dont have easy access to it:

A printer - It was stupidly easy for us to print stuff here at the school and we had a nice allowance for it. I had stupidly bought a printer ahead of time. While nice in that I get to print stuff while in my room... we had a printer at the end of the hall that was available 24/7 and we could send printing requests to it via wifi (after modifying a few small things, instructions were provided by the IT people on the school's website).

A bicycle/A car - It's mainly, which one are you going to want/which one can you afford. Will you even use a car? Do you need to go somewhere far on a constant basis. Are there perhaps easy bus route that can easily take you to places you'll need to go. Will having and paying for a car be more beneficial and time saving since you'll need to visit differing locations quite often and bus fees can add up (though so can gas)... All things to consider. Unless you already have one or the other, WAIT before making a decision.

Mini Vacuum Cleaner - It comes in handy, but maybe the dorm has a large vacuum cleaner you can borrow. This one's not really necessary of course.

A camera - Since it was brought up already. Buy only if you really feel you need it. Unless teachers are pimentos or you're taking a particularly high level course, you should almost never be going through material fast enough that you'd need to take a picture of the notes to be able to keep up. And even the latter case shouldn't really be happening too often, but it's not unheard of. If it's not a huge sized class, just take the notes down and if you didn't get the chance to ask a certain question, you can always ask during office hours. Normally though, good professors usually take the time to relax a bit, let people catch up a bit with notetaking and thus also provide a bit of time for people to ask questions. If this still isn't enough, or you feel that you keep having to leave blank spots on your notes, then sure, maybe taking a picture of the notes suites you. But dont decide on this before you even take a class. You probably wont end up needing it.



Hard to classify:
A cell phone - This one's kind of a toss up. Some people have phones but dont use em. Would be a waste to get one if you're one of those types. If you already have one, then you have one less thing to decide on.

Useful in that:
-you can contact your parents if anything major goes wrong.
-call in to make appointments with the counselors.
-call friends you've made to hang out with them.
-call in pizza from the nearby pizza place (Did that a lot my 3rd/4th year, aka last year and now)