Your Freshman Year Goal-Setting Workshop

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The benefits of setting goals have long been well known in the business and professional world, but very few college students ever commit to sitting down and developing a well thought out set of goals for each year of college, for their college years as a whole, and for their lives after college.

Your Freshman Year Academic and Career Goals

What are some of the academic goals you have coming into college? What possible careers do you find turning around in your head? Are you premed? Does the idea of becoming a lawyer appeal to you? Or perhaps you are focused on a career in business or are interested in becoming an entrepreneur? What subjects would you need to take to properly explore these fields? Maybe one of your goals should be to establish a plan of action to properly explore and perhaps complete one of these programs.

What about teaching or working for a nonprofit?

Or are you interested in a career in finance?

Or something else in the health professions?

Would you need to talk to an academic adviser to help you along?

What courses did you enjoy in high school that you might want to study more intensively in college? Did you enjoy American literature? Maybe you were a history buff. Perhaps you want to try to really understand economics.

Your Freshman Year Social Goals

For a great many of us, college is a time for reinvention - a chance to wipe the slate from high school or boarding school clean and to start a new life in a new place. So who is it that you'd like to become? Do you want to be more outgoing, to force yourself to get out of your comfort zone, to be more daring about asking someone out? Or were you someone who got labeled in high school as a flirt or player or phony or brownnoser, and now find yourself eager to shake that rap as you start your new life in college?

Or are you somewhere in the middle"someone who is just resolved to make a few new good friends, find someone you care about (and actually date the person, rather than just wistfully think about dating him or her), and make a good life for yourself in college?

Whether you were wildly popular, an outcast, a nerd, or anything else on the social spectrum in high school, the slate is clean again now. 

Your Freshman Year Extracurricular Goals

As you are well aware, college is about much more than simply taking the classes you need to complete your major and graduate with your degree. Along the way, there will be countless opportunities to get involved with varsity or intramural sports and a blinding array of campus and community activities.

The sad part is, you can't even come close to sampling them all.

What you can do, though, is brainstorm a list of things you'd like to try during freshman year or during college generally, so that you'll have a better way to manage the barrage of opportunities as they come at you.

Were you recruited to play varsity athletics in college? Maybe you weren't recruited, but believe yourself to be good enough to "walk on" to the team. Or maybe the sport you're most interested in wasn't offered in your high school"but is offered at your college. And what about club sports or intramurals? Is there a sport you'd like to learn or get more involved with on a social level?