Students find it hard to adjust

By Tom McHenry
Summer Editor

Purdue is a big scary place. Sprawling over several miles of misshapen brick buildings and holding around 50,000 people on any given day, it's easy to be overwhelmed.

Despite this sense of fear/wonder, incoming freshmen are still expected to attend class, eat, sleep, and not do too much permanent damage to themselves or others.

Dr. Barry Schreier, psychologist with Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) said that leaving home for college the first time can be a difficult transition to cope with.

Schreier said that students should stay in touch with home and not cut off communication. "Realize that this is a difficult time," Schreier said. "You're leaving home, you're leaving what you’re used to, you're leaving structure."

Schreier said that this communication can help ease the transition, but that incoming freshmen need to realize that there is a transition and accept the fact that they will feel out of sorts.

"People have a very reasonable grief reaction and they think, 'Oh I should be strong', but they need to allow themselves to have a grief reaction," Schreier said. "They get upset and they get upset that they were upset."

To ease some of this pain, Schreier suggested that students get involved in campus organizations in order to stay busy and meet new people, and to get to know the people in their residence hall.

"Folks can isolate pretty quickly and before you know it you don't know anybody," Schreier said. "Its common for people to live in a hall with 60 other people and feel very, very lonely."

Feeling lonely when surrounded by plenty of other students is not the only pitfall that traps new students though. Schreier said that many students have trouble adjusting to the school part of college as well. Schreier said that the people who are often affected worst are those who did very well in high school with a minimum of study. College, on the other hand, requires more reading and more studying.

There is also a tendency to "catastrophize" as Schreier calls it, where students worry about the worst case scenario of even the smallest problem that arises.

Students may also feel a loss of identity by moving into such a large campus where few people, if any know who they are. Especially students from small towns suffer from this feeling according to Schreier.

People having difficulty with the transition to college life or just needing to talk can call Counseling and Psychological Services at