All throughout high school, a state of mind was set in stone: enjoy summer as much as you can, for the school year will start before you know it. However, as I enter my second year of college I find myself feeling the exact opposite: the summers feel like a never-ending countdown and the fall can never come fast enough.
Though we all look forward to getting back into the groove of things, five stages undoubtedly need to occur before we can confidently say that the school year has begun.
Stage 1:
You are sitting on your bedroom floor back home and are feeling overwhelmed. A wave of immense confusion and hesitation overcomes you as you try to piece together where to begin. You slowly look up and see a stack of empty cardboard boxes along with a pile of wrinkled clothes that you spent the last five hours washing and drying sitting before you. Procrastination has become your existence; it is all you know. However, you eventually realize that if you don't pack all your things up, you will arrive to campus with nothing but your carry-on.
Stage 2:
The big day is finally here. It feels as if your whole life has come down to this one late-August moment. You arrive to campus and don't know where to begin. You quickly unpack all of your essentials (bedsheets and a pillow) and leave the rest for another day. Hey, you are a living form of procrastination, so it is the least you could do to live up to your reputation. You bolt out of your dorm room and run around all over campus, not letting anyone or anything get in your way, in the search for your friends whom you haven't seen in months.
Stage 3:
Welcome week. You heard me correctly. This might as well be the best week of any given semester. No responsibilities (yet), no homework or studying (yet), and nothing important happening in any of your classes (yet). This is the time to give it your all and start the year of with a bang. You dress up every night and indulge in everything possible, looking forward with no regrets
. 
Stage 4:
Remember how you had that "no regrets" mindset? Well, you take it back. You have all the regrets possible. You are exhausted, your head is pounding, and all you want to do is stay in bed for the rest of the semester. You question all of the poor decisions you have made the past week and you wonder how it ended up coming down to this. You spend all of Sunday shoving Advil down your throat and attempting to sleep every bad decision and body ache off. But you survived. You came out of Welcome Week knowing you gave it your all.
Stage 5:
After a week of non-stop partying, you come to the realization that all good things must eventually come to an end. You prepare yourself for a new semester, gathering all your stuff up the morning of classes. Since you actually now have responsibilities, homework, and studying to do, and a lot happening in your classes too, it is time to buckle down and remember why we came to college in the first place.
