To freshman me,

Remember your dad driving you on your first day? Remember the song on the radio? It'll always be your favorite as your dad sings along and tells you how proud he is of you. You'll still cry as it comes through the speakers of your car.

On your first day, you’re going to meet a person who you will constantly laugh with. You’re going to be really homesick the first few days. You’re going to hate the chow food. You’re going to get really sick because you’re not used to the hundreds of people coming from around the country with all these different colds. You’re going to fall in love with the place that you will soon call home.

The girl that you meet when you’re checking in, that’s your roommate. She’s going to stay up with you and laugh about all the hilarious moments that happened in her 8 a.m. that day. You'll talk about your 8 a.m. and again, the hilarious moments.

You’re going to exchange phone numbers and send one another messages throughout the breaks between class. You'll arrange to have lunch together everyday. You’re going to get into fights. You’re going to form a bond only you and her will ever understand. You’re going to learn how to maneuver around campus as all the rooks are walking around with their platoons and for a split second you realize you didn’t hear them coming from around the building because you have your headphones in. You'll form a group of friends who became your family, freshman year.

You’re going to fall in love. You’re going to be captivated. You’re going to spend two beautiful years with someone. You’re going to have fights. You’re going to share beautiful memories, but you’re going to have to leave him in the past to allow yourself to grow and work on your future. And you will heal from the heartbreak and be happy that he found someone who he glows when he looks at now. You'll be happy he finally found someone who made his world brighter again.

The girl you meet your sophomore year, she’s going to become your best friend. You’re going to come to laugh about how you’re both trying your hardest in class, and that your professor loves your charisma you have for math. She’s going to show you your true potential. She’s going to introduce you to her best friend. They’re going to make you realize the type of person who you really are: confident.

Your junior year, you’re going to struggle. You’re going to have ups and downs. Sometimes your year will become stale. But you will make it through. The girl you meet your first day of psychology, she’s going to become your best friend. The people on her floor, they’re going to make a huge impact on your life. They’re going to become some of the best people you will ever meet in your life. They’re going to be some of the people you tell your niece about before her first day at college.

Your senior year, you’re going to struggle. Your work-load will be intense. You will be challenged in the classroom to absorb some of the toughest material you’d ever endure. You’re going to look at schools far away from home to get your masters. You’re going to eventually look for an apartment. You’re going to move away from your family, and you’re going to cry the last day that you have to pack up your dorm room — home of the last four years — one last time. You’re going to pull away and realize that these last four years went by way too fast.

Your last four years, you’ve changed into someone you wouldn’t recognize. You’ll realize at 22, that 18-year-old you were so young, so innocent. You thought you had it all figured out, but you really didn’t. At 22, you still don’t have it all figured out, but that’s OK. You gained friends along the way, and you lost some others. You got a degree, and you’re starting to move on.

So now you’re a college graduate. You look back on the four years that shaped your every sense of reality. You look back at when your face hurt from smiling so much, and the times that made you cry.

And you realize:

You’re not ready to say goodbye to your college experience yet. You’re not ready to see what lies ahead, because it is all so uncertain. You’ve had your schedule all planned out, knew where you would have to be and what time these last few years. Now, all you know is come May it’s time to leave. It’s time to take one more lap around the UP as you hug all your friends goodbye, and watch them become the nation’s next leaders, wish the others good luck in the years that they have left until they graduate too. It’s time to walk out of the field house one last time. It’s time to look at the football field and realize these last four years this is where you were every Saturday during the fall. It was where you cheered them on and watched your friends become champions.

Four years will come and go a lot quicker than you will ever realize. You’re going to fall in love with your home away from home, even though you will thoroughly deny it every chance that you can get. But looking back, you’ll smile. You’ll laugh. You may cringe a bit. But deep inside you’ll know that it was where you belonged.

And as you throw your cap in the air, you can't help but know that you would do it all over again if you had the chance.

Norwich Forever.