You hear all about it your whole life. If you were an early reader and writer like I was, the adults crooned at you and patted you on the cheek, talking about how far you're going to go in life. She's going to go to a GREAT college. In elementary school, the nerdy kids were the ones all the kids secretly envied; parents placed bets about their kids' future.

My kid's headed to Harvard, just you wait! In middle school, college was a vague concept, only a taste of what's the come in the future. I'll probably go to the college closest to my home; I don't want to be too far away. But high school forced you to shape up, grow up, and go up. This school's the best in the state; I've GOT to go there!

And so you did.

But what is college really about? You've heard about it your whole life, but no one ever really sits down and tells you what college is all about. No one tells you that you'll probably experience your first failing test grade in college, or that you'll be pressed with so many meetings and deadlines that it'll seem hard to breathe sometimes.

Nobody tells you that you'll meet friends that'll last a lifetime, and that you may fall in love with your life's work here. Nobody tells you that you'll yearn for home, and that you may end up crying on the phone with your mom at 2 am, begging to come home.

Nobody tells you that college is both a blessing and a curse.

But what IS college?

College is the place where you become an adult. It may even be the place where you get your first job. It's where you begin to learn how to properly life, practically. You'll learn how to open a bank account (or just withdraw from a bank account), deposit a paycheck, get interviewed...the list goes on and on.

College is the place where you'll realize how hard life actually is. You'll realize that nobody could care less about you, especially if you're balancing a job with classes. You'll learn that the world where you were the perfect little high schooler never really existed. And it may take an F on a test (or even a class) or a class withdrawal to fully realize that. You'll realize that textbooks are expensive, but maybe not as much as food, because us students have to eat, right?

But please, do not fret. While all these drawbacks may seem like the end of the world now, you'll laugh at them in the near future.

For college is a time for meeting new people. Hundreds of smiling faces and shaking hands. This is where people meet their life-long best-friends, their maids-of-honor and best men. Their eventual husbands, and wives. Even the relationships you thread with your professors will last a long while if you let them, and you should; connections are priceless in the real world.

College is where people come to life. You may be here to study, but I'm here to cultivate my passion, so who knows what the future may bring?