Starting college can be a big change for high school students. Between classes, meeting new people and exploring a new town, school work can be hard to manage and some freshmen end up having to repeat or drop courses. Here’s what you need to know about successfully navigating your first 15 credit hours as a college freshmen. 

Dropping Classes

The first two weeks of classes are your time to figure out if you can handle the workload of your first semester and gives you window of time to drop a course before it affects your transcript. If you drop a class after the first couple weeks a “W” will go on your transcript showing that you withdrew from the course before it was complete. Before dropping a class always talk to your advisor to see how it will effect your schedule and GPA.

“Freshman Forgiveness”

There are two policies at Kent State that are there to help you out if you don’t do so well in a class. Repeat for Recalculation is a policy that allows any student to repeat a 10000 or 20000 level course that they did not do well in the first time. If you get a higher grade in the class, your second time around it will replace your lower grade in your GPA for that class. The second policy is called Academic Forgiveness and is for students that have been out for a year and want to come back to Kent State. After returning the student must complete 12 credit hours at a C or higher and then they can petition to have any grades below a C removed from their transcript.

“We have those two policies to help students who maybe had trouble in their first semester or they had a bad year,” said Steven Antalvari, director of University Advising. “This allows a student to maybe make up their gpa a little bit faster.”

Antalvari knows how hard it can be to manage a full time class schedule amongst all of the things going on in someone’s life, so he has provided a couple tips for students on how they can successfully manage their first semester as a full time college student.

Time Management

“Class is 15 hours a week. They say you should study for two hours for every hour you’re in class,” he said. ‘So budget that time, be prepared, know your schedule, and students who are able to think a little bit forward and who will be able to budget that time accordingly are more successful and feel more comfortable with the schedule and don’t have to withdraw from a class because they can’t keep up.”

Know Your Own Schedule

Antalvari also said it’s important for students to know what works for them in terms of personal success. Students need to factor in all of the other things going on in their lives on top of their school work.

“Know when you budget your time,” he said. Always factor in all the things that are happening within your life, whether that is work, family, extracurriculars.”

Jacqueline DeMate is the managing editor of the Summer Kent Stater.