We see someone walking down the street or across the hall from us. We see their clothes and their hair. We see these obvious outward traits and we think we know something about a person, we think we know what kind of person they are. Gender, religion, race, team, political party—these are all things that are used to define people, to put them into categories so that we can understand them.

Here’s the thing: categories aren’t all bad. Our brain automatically categorizes the world around us so that it is easier to take in and process information. As much as this helps us move through our environment and limits extraneous information, it also limits what we see and what we take in and what we can experience. Using categories to understand people is especially problematic. People are complex beings, we have infinite capacity for emotion and the ability to do almost anything that another one of us can imagine. We are creatures so varied and different that we are not easy to categorize. But we have ideas of what people do what things and what people wear what things. We construct patterns of who does and likes certain things. It becomes hard to break out of these patterns of belief. If someone tells you from a young age that you have to fit into a certain category or definition, that you’re supposed to be a certain type of person, your brain starts to think that you are that definition and that you are that person. It becomes so hard for you to learn that you can be so much more than that one thing, even if no one was explicitly trying to tell you to be that certain way.

Talking to my brother, a freshman lacrosse player, he seems to mostly worry about one thing: that people perceive him as just a lacrosse player. They think he’ll be stereotypical, stuck up and self-centered, which isn’t him at all. But it’s okay, because he hasn’t found yet that college is magical.

College is magical because it restructures everything. If you’re anything like me in high school you were a shy varsity hockey player, and now in college you’ve become a running, yoga-crazy vegetarian club hockey player that really likes to write. If you’re not, that’s okay too, because it doesn’t matter. College is magical because you can be anything you want.

It’s a cliché, they say that when you go to college you can become a “new you,” that you can change yourself and become a totally different person. That’s not true. In high school, people are just beginning to navigate the world. They need categories to make it simple and easy to understand. When we get to college most people have moved beyond that, and that’s why college is magical. The walls that people use to understand and categorize others in high school are broken down. People are shoved into new situations, into close quarters, and out of their established patterns and behaviors. They are forced to completely restructure their lives.

When this kind of intense restructuring occurs, more than just patterns and habits shift around. People break out of their comfort zones, they learn more about themselves, as well as their own capabilities and beliefs. When people are placed in a new situation, forced to do and try new things, they find new things about themselves. They look inward and become more than they were, more than the simple category they once fit themselves into. The sorority girl is more than just a sorority girl. The lacrosse player is more than just a lacrosse player. They are complex; they are more than just one small aspect of their lives.

College is magical because it allows us to learn so much about the world at the same time that we learn about ourselves, changing and growing and expanding as we go along. It allows us to change our lives, to look inward and to find out how complex we are as human beings and realize that because of this complexity, we cannot be fit into any categories anymore.