In the weeks before you move in and experience orientation week, you’ve probably received lots and lots of advice from your teachers, parents and orientation leaders to seize all the opportunities you can and to experience everything that college has to offer. But here’s the problem: College is huge. Every time you check your email, there’s a reminder or flier for a new event you’ve never heard of, an invitation to join a club or an experience that advertises itself as vital for college students. You’re constantly being pulled in different directions, and you have no idea if those directions are right for you. These people are all well-meaning; they want you to have the best possible time here at Case Western Reserve University. But if you try to experience it all, you’ll burn out quickly.

To help you navigate this problem, here are a few pieces of advice.

Firstly, if you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance that you aren’t even 100 percent sure if you want to stick with your major. There’s a lot of implicit pressure to figure out exactly where you’re going in college early on. If you’re a first-year student, you’ve felt that pressure when you introduced yourself to your orientation group. If you said you were undecided, you might have felt self-conscious. If you firmly said what you’ll be majoring in, chances are that you sounded a lot more confident than you actually are. Don’t worry, most other students feel exactly the same way. People in a stable career will often tell others that they’ve always known what they wanted to do, or they’ll play down how unsure they used to be, because it makes their life story sound more compelling. It takes time to figure out what you want to do, and once you do make a decision, you’ll wake up every morning doubting yourself only slightly less than the last.

Secondly, don’t be in too many clubs. Pick one, maybe two, that you like the most and stick with those. Why, you may ask? Aren’t more clubs better? Well, when it comes to job searching, more is definitely not better. The main goal of participating in a club is not to put your membership on your resume like a badge, but it is to gather stories you can tell during interviews about times you demonstrated leadership or overcame a struggle. Becoming a central figure of a single club and being there for its biggest struggles are much more valuable than being on the fringe of multiple clubs and never really benefiting from them. So by all means, sign up for lots of clubs at the Student Activities Fair, and show up to the first meeting or two; but if you end up not liking them as much as you expected, don’t be afraid to unsubscribe from their mailing lists.

My last major piece of advice is to meet as many people as you can in your first few weeks. Try not to be self-conscious about approaching new people out of the blue. When I did it, I usually found that the person in question was happy that they didn’t have to do the work themselves. Making that effort can be exhausting—trust me, I’m an introvert—but the more often you introduce yourself, the faster you’ll find your people. Furthermore, if you receive an invitation from someone you met recently, you should do your best to accept. This will give you a reputation in their minds as someone likely to accept invitations, so they’ll be more likely to invite you to other social events. You can always say no to the next one! Your future social connections will be everything. Whenever you’re in a rough spot in the future, or whenever you need just a little bit of extra help to finish a homework assignment, the time spent making a friend in the same class will have been worth it.

CWRU is somewhat infamous for its rigor. Depending on the field you’re in, this reputation may end up being accurate, especially if your job market is competitive. You may feel like you have to gain as much work and club experience as possible. Sure, both are important, but the concept of work-life balance applies to college just as much as a career, especially since club activities blur the line between work and life. Being a STEM major can be especially bad in a culture of constant productivity and self-improvement, so you have to be conscious about how much you’re putting on your plate.

College is like a backpacking trip. Each individual item you carry may seem important—and most of the time they actually are that important—but as a whole the most important objective is the ability to keep hiking with what you’re carrying. If you’re finding it difficult to put one foot in front of the other, you have to look at your load critically and reassess what burdens you really need to carry. And it’s much safer and more fun if you’re moving along with friends.