Learning should never stop outside of the classroom, and at Pratt, it certainly didn't for me. My teachers and classmates taught me a lot freshman year, but here are 5 things that I figured out mostly on my own.

1.) Your fluctuation of friends may be frequent. The first year of school, everyone is looking for friends. Nobody knows anybody, but also nobody wants to look like they don’t have company. This leads to sporadic and often randomly assembled groups of “friends” that last for a week or two before they dissolve entirely. I put friends in quotation marks because these groups of people are not actual groups of friends. They may become groups of friends, but at the present time, they are just people who are trying to meet and connect with strangers in a new place. This is why NO ONE SHOULD FREAK OUT if they do not find a solid group of college friends immediately. Just try and meet as many people as you can, because you never know who’s cool until you meet them for yourself.

2.) You are in charge of your own stress. No matter how much work you have to do or expectations you need to meet, you already know that feeling stressed out is not going to be helpful to you. The best way to get what you need to do done is by remaining chill, because stress is a self-produced obstacle. If you take active steps to lower your level of anxiety, all of your endeavors will become easier to accomplish. They may even be enjoyable to carry out, now that you’re not so stressed out.

3.) A whole team can be driven by just one person’s motivation. If you’re working as a group on something and it seems like the people on your team aren’t excited about the project, that doesn’t mean the work is going to be bad. I’ve seen it happen—sometimes, all it takes is just one person getting invested in a project to get the rest of the team up and going. If you are in a group setting and you find that there is low morale, don’t shy away from the opportunity to try and raise it. Your excitement can become their excitement, if you can find it in you to get pumped. Don’t take low morale as accepted defeat.

4.) Not everyone has to like what you do. It’s important to make sure that you are proud of the choices you make. If you’re choosing to do or not do something simply because someone else says so, then you might consider rethinking your actions. You’ve heard it before: you can’t please everyone. But you can at least try to make yourself happy, so don’t let anything as negligible as someone else’s opinion keep you from doing you.

5.) Some things do not have a satisfying ending. Take this list, for example. It's over now.

Freshman year to me was a whirlwind, and it went by in the blink of an eye. I didn't always learn the way I imagined I would, but this past year I was reminded that important lessons are not always the ones taught in class.