2016 is coming to an end, and college students are preparing to or already taking their finals for the first semester. I am one of those people taking college finals for the first time, and it's a little intimidating to say the least. What is also intimidating is looking back on, not even this entire year, but just on this last semester.

I was learning to balance more schoolwork than I ever had had before, along with trying to establish myself on campus and making new friends. As much of a privileged difficulty as it is, it is hard to do. I learned to handle 5 different college classes, studying for every single test extensively and writing paper after paper, and I made some pretty good friends along the way as well. So, let that show that it is possible to do, as much of a balancing act as it is. But, this isn't a story about making friends and studying for philosophy tests.

You have to learn a lot about yourself in college. For many of us, it's our first time living away from our families and leaving behind all the friends that we've known for so long. We have to learn to function independently from our parents or guardians, and being thrown into that is always uneasy. On top of this, college is so unpredictable and anything can happen in just a few months.

It feels like I got the entire college experience in one semester. I not only had projects, exams, essays, but I dealt with family emergencies and stresses, and issues with friends and relationships. My campus is currently in the middle of dealing with a sexual assault case and the backlash administration is receiving from their handling of that case. What I'm saying is, it can feel like you experience the entire college experience within a handful of months. How you handle that really depends on you personally, but it's important to handle it. You don't have the luxury of falling back on your family entirely, you have to be able to deal with issues yourself. Find what works for you and stay with it, cause it can only help you in the long run.

In college, it is very hard to be static and set in your ways. Not only in homework and study habits, but in an internal sense too. Opinions change, what you like changes, the type of people you like changes. Things in college change at the snap of a finger, and you have to be ready to change with it.

This is the point I'm getting at, with all my ramblings: you have to allow yourself room to grow, as a person and as a student. Allow yourself the flexibility to change. Understand that you're human, you make mistakes, you can grow from those mistakes. Don't be the person who is stuck in their ways and refuses to learn; that's the point of going to college, is to learn. Learning entails so much more than what you learn in class -- college teaches you to be independent, it teaches you to be assertive, and it definitely teaches patience. If you go into college expecting to remain the same person as you were going in, then you're going to be in for a bit of a shock. Just in this first semester, I think I've changed in ways I didn't think I would (and I am a pretty stubborn person). What I'm trying to say is, let yourself be flexible and allow that growth to happen. You may become a better person, and you might make a mistake or two. Trust yourself, believe what you want to believe, but allow yourself room to grow. Whenever people say that college really changes you and a lot can happen in just one 4-month long semester, believe them. Everything changes in an instant.