“If you are irritated by every rub, how can you be polished?” is a quote by Rumi, a Persian poet. This quote talks about welcoming life’s challenges and to not be irritated at every challenge that comes our way. I think this fits my experience so far at Baruch. I am welcoming the new challenges of college life, such as the workload, time management, and moving out of my comfort zone. In college, the work isn’t as much as high school but when you procrastinate and the work stacks up, then it becomes a problem, so I guess the workload and time management comes together here. Time management is a challenge for me because I want to socialize, play games, and still keep up the good grades. And finally, meeting new people was hard in high school because we were confined to our classrooms and I was reluctant to meet new people because the other high school students were reluctant to talk to me too. But, now in college, I am more open to meeting people and college students are more open too. Another challenge that I’ve encountered is being independent. Back in high school, I had a group of friends and would do everything together but now that I’m in college, I can’t depend on a group of friends to do things that I want to do, because: 1) they’re not there and 2), not everyone wants to do the things that I want to do. So to sum it up, I learned to face my challenges head on rather than leaving them aside, ignoring them or make excuses for not facing them.