I talked to a first year student at the university I want to join, studying the exact course I want to apply for, and I kind of wish I hadn't. Not because they lied to me. Actually the opposite, they were really honest and that's what's messing with my head now. I had this picture in my mind of what campus would be like, what the course would feel like, how the whole thing would go. And this conversation didn't destroy that picture but it definitely added things to it that weren't there before. They told me about units that are genuinely brutal. About lecturers who don't explain things the way teachers did in secondary school, you're expected to figure a lot out on your own. About the gap between thinking you understand what a course is about and actually sitting in it week after week. They said the adjustment in first semester alone caught a lot of people off guard, including people who had been top of their class their whole lives. Some of what they said was good though. They talked about how much freedom campus gives you, how differently you start to think after a few months, how certain things just click in ways they never did in school. So it wasn't all bad. But the honest parts, the hard parts, those are the ones sitting with me right now. I went into that conversation wanting someone to tell me I'd made the right choice wanting to go there. I came out with a much more complicated feeling that I'm still trying to sort through. My question is this: do you think it's better to go in knowing the hard stuff ahead of time? Or does knowing too much before you even start create problems that wouldn't have existed if you'd just walked in open? Has anyone else had a conversation like this and how did it affect what you decided to do?

I talked to a first year student at the university I want to join, studying the exact course I want to apply for, and I kind of wish I hadn't. Not because they lied to me. Actually the opposite, they were really honest and that's what's messing with my head now. I had this picture in my mind of what campus would be like, what the course would feel like, how the whole thing would go. And this conversation didn't destroy that picture but it definitely added things to it that weren't there before. They told me about units that are genuinely brutal. About lecturers who don't explain things the way teachers did in secondary school, you're expected to figure a lot out on your own. About the gap between thinking you understand what a course is about and actually sitting in it week after week. They said the adjustment in first semester alone caught a lot of people off guard, including people who had been top of their class their whole lives. Some of what they said was good though. They talked about how much freedom campus gives you, how differently you start to think after a few months, how certain things just click in ways they never did in school. So it wasn't all bad. But the honest parts, the hard parts, those are the ones sitting with me right now. I went into that conversation wanting someone to tell me I'd made the right choice wanting to go there. I came out with a much more complicated feeling that I'm still trying to sort through. My question is this: do you think it's better to go in knowing the hard stuff ahead of time? Or does knowing too much before you even start create problems that wouldn't have existed if you'd just walked in open? Has anyone else had a conversation like this and how did it affect what you decided to do?