It’s a common phrase: “College is the best four years of your life”.

The best four years of my life started out like this:

I had a terrible first year roommate - a girl who only wanted to party, could care less about classes (in the Honors College, no less), didn’t talk to me, and was a slob.

I was homesick and would cry most weekends when I had to return to school.

I was taking 5 engineering classes and was incredibly overwhelmed with all the work I had to do.

I sprained my ankle and ended up on crutches doing gymnastics my second week on the team, thus losing the one activity I really loved.

I had digestive problems, trying to deal with being recently diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.

Conclusion: my first year did NOT start out great. At all.

And there I was, thinking my four years of college were going to be awesome. I was skeptical of this from the beginning, because I knew that college was going to be a big transition for me. But I can assure you I wasn’t thinking I’d have that bad a time.

Thank goodness for the Associate Dean of the Honors College at the time (now Interim Dean), who brought up the aforementioned common phrase, but then said, “Well hey, if college is the best four years of your life, I feel pretty bad for you, because you’re all only 18, and that would set up the rest of your life to be pretty horrible”. Pretty good point, right? I definitely don’t want to peak from age 18-22, only to have the next 70 or so years of my life all be downhill.

This advice gave me some good new perspective at the time (although several of the unfortunate events I mentioned had not yet happened).

So we can summarize my freshman year of college as a low point in my life. There’s always a silver lining though, right? My silver lining was that I grew incredibly strong after facing all that adversity. Truthfully, looking back now, I don’t know how I did it. I’ll confide that several times I called my mother up, in tears, convinced I was going to get her to drive to UVM and take me home.

Suffice it to say that each of those times, she managed to calm me down and put everything into perspective. Enough of that, and some positive changes in my life (such as moving in with a new roommate in the spring), and I was able to make it through the end of my freshman year.

Four years later, I can’t say that college was/will be the best four years of my life…but I’ll admit that it was a pretty great four years (especially the last three).

My sophomore year I’d learned my lesson and chose my roommate beforehand. More underclassmen joined the gymnastics team, I made friends with them, and was able to get more involved with the team. I also got a handle on my heavy engineering class load.

From there, it only went up. I got my own apartment off campus, I made more friends in my engineering classes, I got even more passionate about gymnastics, and I was no longer homesick. I actually looked forward to going back to UVM after a weekend away! Imagine that.

One of the most important things I did for myself was to shake off that first year and look ahead to the positives. There really was nowhere to go but up, so I have that to be thankful for!

After graduating from UVM last spring, I looked back and saw the transition I’d made from four years prior, in terms of how much I’d grown as a person, and how much my relationship with UVM had changed. I no longer resented college and the difficulties it had brought me. Instead, I looked at all my experiences fondly and with quite a bit of nostalgia. It still is odd for me today to think about the fact that I graduated from college.

Those four years were a big, defining part of my life.

The perfect storm my freshman year petered out to a calming rain, and I ended up standing in brilliant rays of sunshine. And clearly, I’m pretty corny about it. 😉