 What's up guys, it's Josh from Backing and I'm gonna let you know that today's video is going to be the first in a little mini-series on my channel where I talk to you guys about preparing for college and specifically preparing for starting your freshman year. This is a really stressful time and it's gonna be unlike anything you've ever experienced in your entire life. So hopefully I can ease this suffering a little bit and give you guys a couple tips when it comes to going into your freshman year. For those of you that don't know, my name is Josh Beasley and I'm a rising sophomore now at Yale University studying electrical engineering and computer science. On this channel I mainly post Yale vlogs, sit down videos like this, sometimes I do student interviews, a bunch of really cool stuff related to my life at college. So if you're interested in that definitely consider subscribing. I know a lot of you guys will be starting college in a couple of weeks so I wanted to get these out as soon as possible. Today's video is gonna be some general tips on preparing for your freshman year. It's gonna be a little intro to the series and the other videos will be coming soon so subscribe to get ready for that. Alright let's get into it. My first big tip is to take advantage of all the orientation activities. Every school does it different but this doesn't change the fact that you should be making a conscious effort to go to as many of these activities as possible even when you don't want to. A lot of schools have their orientation during the summer where you'll go to campus for a couple of days and meet some new people, kind of get used to campus. But other schools have it right before school starts. That's how Yale did it. In this case you should try to attend and meet as many people as possible. Also if your school has a meet-up in your area or your city before school actually starts I recommend going to those. It's a great opportunity to meet other students from your specific area. Students that you may become friends with and start hanging out with once you get back from college. Me personally I went to the Yale DC meet-up for all the students that were living in the area and that was a great opportunity and I highly recommend it to anyone that has that chance. Also there might be optional pre-orientation trips. I recommend that you take full advantage of these also. At Yale I went on an outdoor backpacking and pre-orientation trip where I spent six days in the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts hiking with nine other Yale-ies that I had never met before and by the end of the trip we became pretty close and had a solid group of friends before I even went into orientation. It was great. I found with these orientation trips when it comes to starting college and everyone getting into new school, no one knows each other and everyone's trying to make friends. So it makes it super easy to make friends and develop relationships because the whole social scene is super malleable. As soon as you're a month or two into school though you'll realize that all of the clicks have started to form and it's a lot harder to make friends or kind of find a friend group. So take advantage of all these opportunities super early and try to meet as many people as possible. That's my biggest tip. My next tip is to be prepared for when you actually arrive at college. This means physically and mentally. Physically you should have brought all your dorm room items and school supplies that will allow you to be successful for the year. I'm not going to list all these off right now. I plan on making a future video about it but you need to be prepared with everything you need for the year. Make sure your stuff is organized and ready to go and it's all packed nicely because otherwise it's going to be an absolute mess when you actually get there to move in. Mentally you need to adopt the right mindset for college. This means kind of being open to new opportunities. You're going to be experiencing a lot of new things, meaning new people the first couple of weeks and if you're not remaining open minded and trying to take every single challenge head on you're going to have a difficult time. So try to stay open minded and it will help you adjust a lot better. My next tip is related to the whole roommate situation. At most schools you will have a roommate freshman year and the way that your roommate has decided varies between schools. Some schools you're responsible for finding your own roommate so that can be through the Facebook page or sometimes they have specific pages for finding your roommates or you can just choose to go random if you want. At Yale we got randomly sorted into colleges and then our dean handpicked who we're actually rooming with. A lot of schools just do it like completely random and everyone has to go random too. So I mean whatever happens you're going to have a roommate. Once you finally find somebody the most important thing is communication. I remember I found out Jake was my roommate in like June and we talked a little bit but that was about it. When we got to school we realized we didn't really know that much about each other. It took a little bit of time to adjust and like we also the whole thing when it comes to like packing and who's going to bring what we hadn't really decided that so it was it was a little difficult getting our room set up for the first couple days. You need to start talking to them getting to know them but most important of all you need to start coordinating who is going to bring what to your to your suite. You don't want to end up with two fridges two microwaves and a bunch of other useless stuff. There are a lot of items like this that need coordination before you come into school and are super hard to get like the first couple days and if you don't plan those out ahead of time the first couple days are going to be very chaotic. My last tip for this video applies to academics. Start researching what classes you want to take and how you're going to construct the schedule for your first semester. Or you arrive on camp. At least at Yale we didn't have to turn in our official schedules till two weeks in the semester because we had our whole shopping period thing so I thought I could just wait till I got to school to start researching classes. Those first couple weeks are going to be so chaotic that you're not going to have time to research classes. So I recommend doing so before you get to school. Maybe your school has course signups like before you didn't get there. Obviously you should be doing your search then but a lot of times set a specific schedule of classes you want to take and then once you get to school you can start talking to people and you might change it a little bit but for the most part you need to do most of your research before you get there. This will make the first couple days a lot less stressful for you and your professors. Alright that's about it for this video. I hope you enjoyed my tips for how to prepare for your freshman year of college. If you did drop a thumbs up down below. It helps me and supports the channel a lot more than you think. If you have any questions, comments, concerns about college, preparing for college, any future video ideas in this series drop them down below. I will try to respond to you and maybe do your video if it's a good idea. If you're new, subscribe.