18
Advice To New Students
by Asad Sayeeduddin
Salaam,
To the freshmen and new students, welcome to Loyola. To the upperclassmen and the sophomores who I still consider freshmen, welcome back to campus. I was asked to write an article where I share advice with you as you finish the exciting, depressing, and most importantly, mind-opening experience that is undergrad. There are more qualified people than I for this. Since I graduated just a few months ago, I may not have the experience and wisdom you may be looking for, but I'll try my best. I'm going to keep this brief and direct this to the underclassmen, although those past their sophomore year may still benefit.
Get out of your comfort zone - you don't have time for it. Undergrad, whether you stay for four years, three years, five years, or some other amount of time, will be gone before you know it. Furthermore, recreating this opportunity will be a difficult task. To be put in situations where you need to justify your decisions (to yourself and to others), to justify your Islamic moral values, your understanding of success, and what role you want to play in your communities is what will determine the kind of person you are. Your time in the classroom, the hours in the IC, and those countless hours spent "chillin" in the musalla are very unlikely to be a significant part in you becoming aware of the world around you.
So you may wonder, how do I get out of my comfort zone? For starters, take that extra step in meeting a non-Muslim. It's a trend among Loyola students to be friends exclusively with Muslims and only Arab and Desi Muslims at that. We end up isolating ourselves. Meeting people who may not be similar to you will allow you to learn things about yourself; it will challenge the ideas you've unfairly held about how the world operates.
Freshman Interview!