Coming to Auburn as a freshman, Julia Tucker feared the crowds at a major university; Aaron Pierce was most nervous about retaining the quality of friends he had in high school; and Ian Maples was nervous about meeting people.
Tucker, Pierce and Maples do not know each other, but they have a bond because all three were home-schooled for most of their education prior to coming to Auburn.
"Home schooling is individualized to different people," said Tucker, sophomore in piano performance and economics, who graduated high school at 14 and began attending Auburn at 15.
Tucker said she hadn't planned to graduate early.
"It was sort of a, 'If you finished this math book, move on to the next one,'" Tucker said. "It wasn't a, 'Are you supposed to be doing this now?'"
Tucker said her parents decided to home-school her because she read at a high level, and home schooling gave her an opportunity to focus on music.
"Being in school from 8 to 3 in the afternoon, it didn't give a whole lot of time for other activities," Tucker said.
Aaron Pierce, senior in industrial design, said his home schooling experience required a lot of self-motivation to get work done.
"(We) make our assignments much like you would do for a co-op program, a class that you go to one day a week, and the rest of the week you work on the work the teacher assigns to you," Pierce said.
His mom and dad and sometimes parents of other home-schooled students that had specialties in areas like world literature were his teachers.
"It worked out really well because there was kinda like a community of people that were like, 'Hey, we are going to home-school our kids,'" Pierce said.
Pierce said they had papers and assignments like students would in other classes.
Ian Maples, freshman in pre-architecture, was home-schooled on a strict schedule by his mother beginning in sixth grade.
Maples said his mom woke him and his brothers up every morning at 6:30, and they had to start by 8 a.m. They worked the entire day with only a 15-minute break midmorning and a 30-minute lunch break.
"Not that we did that though; we tried to slack off as much as possible," Maples said. "She didn't really let that happen."
Preparing for college, Tucker, Pierce and Maples said their experiences were much like other students.
They completed their curricula and took a standardized test to be accepted into Auburn.
Each said the first day of school went well overall.
Tucker said it was definitely a different experience, though.
"Just the sitting in class part was actually the strangest part for me," Tucker said.
Tucker said she didn't know how long the Tuesday and Thursday classes were going to last and found herself getting antsy.
"I called home a lot," Pierce said. "I called Foy a lot, made friends really easy in my class, set up a study group almost immediately. The first day was really good."
Pierce started classes early, taking classes the summer before he came to Auburn.
"I was able to ease into Auburn instead of getting kinda thrown into it, like I feel a lot of other kids are," Pierce said.
Maples said the first day was different than home schooling because it was more organized.
"You had to be there at a certain time," Maples said. "With home schooling you didn't have to do math at a certain time. As long as you got a certain amount of schoolwork done during the day, you were good."
Wanting friends is not unique to any freshman.
Tucker said misconceptions about home-schoolers come from the various approaches to home schooling.
"Some people believe that home-schoolers are very backwoods, very Christian," Tucker said. "Girls wear long dresses and never cut their hair."
Maples said another misconception is that home-schoolers are more socially awkward.
"I guess that would be true for some, but I haven't had a problem fitting in at Auburn," Maples said.
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