Congrats on completing your first year of college!
I see, you don’t feel excited because college is essentially just one thing you feel must do as told. Moreover, you have chosen to pursue a degree in engineering merely to avoid college-level English classes, a subject you have painfully survived as an ESL student back in high school. Electrical Engineering, in particular, will be your major starting from second year not because you enjoy the subject — you have absolutely no idea what an electrical engineer does — but because the program demands the brightest students with the highest GPA’s of all engineering disciplines. After all, your passion does not matter because what you should do, as always, has already been pre-determined: Conforming to the “norm” and studying for a lucrative job upon graduation.
Yes, I understand. You have just arrived at a new country and will spend the next God-knows-how-many years of your life living in a town so remote that you have never even heard of before. You have lost all your friends and worse yet, you can’t speak a word of the local language. Sure, there is a phone but a long-distance call over the Pacific Ocean back to where you come from will cost a fortune that you know your family cannot afford. So here you are, left alone in isolation at a foreign place. You are lonely. You are scared. And you feel hopeless.
As despairing as it may seem for the days to come, however, don’t you ever let fear take over your life. Think about it: This is not the end of the world, far from it. You will make new friends, if you stay open-minded. You will learn the language, if you are willing to put in the efforts. You will even realize what a beautiful place you have come to, if you are willing to walk out of that tiny little room of yours and start exploring. So don’t be afraid, for life has just presented you an adventure, one that perhaps at this point seems overwhelming and yet, I guarantee you, will be rewarding when you look back in life.