I’m sure you hear it all the time, from many different people, that high school sucks. And I didn’t really think that much about it while I was in high school, but now that I’m ending my 2nd month at college and entering my 3rd, I’ve made quite a few realizations. My high school experience wasn’t really all that great.

I went to a fairly small school, graduating with 81 students. Everyone knew everyone in my school, and sometimes that can be a bad thing, and sometimes that can be a good thing. It depends on who you ask. I experienced both the good and the bad throughout my 4 years. I went through a few different friends and groups of people I hung out with, I was in 2 sports, involved in 3 extracurricular activities, and I had a job. I was a busy girl. I got 5-7 hours of sleep every night and I was stressed 99% of the time. Stressed about school, stressed about friends, stressed about time management, anything going on in my life, I was most definitely stressed about it. It really took a lot out of me.

Now that it’s all over, I started to realize that I really wasn’t all that happy.

Then I went to college. I may have only been here for about 2 months, but there’s so much that is different. First of all, my schedule is so clear. I don’t have class until 9, which automatically gives me an extra hour of sleep. I only have 4 classes, which is so much less work than 7. I have a job, but going from 20 hours a week to 6 hours a week is such a big change. I also don’t do sports and am not involved in anything that takes up too much of my time. Since the first day of class, I haven’t felt overwhelmed with anything and I am virtually stress-free, which is a strange feeling since that’s all I ever was before.

The biggest difference is the people. Maybe it’s a high school thing, maybe it was just me, but at my high school, I didn’t really talk to a big percentage of people. I stuck to my main group of friends. Partially because I’m not much of a social butterfly, but also because not everyone seemed like they had much interest in talking to me. Then I came to Gustavus.

Everyone here is so nice and genuinely seem like they want to talk to you.

I’ve made quite a few acquaintances and I’ve met some awesome people that I now call my good friends. Throughout middle school and high school, I cycled through a lot of friends and experienced some pretty toxic ones. I didn’t always feel as though I could be myself, and half the time I wasn’t myself. I was pretty held back by the fact that I cared what people thought of me and the worry that I was going to be judged. I didn’t really fit in with many people I went to high school with. Now that I’m at college, I feel like I can be myself and my friends accept me for that, and I don’t have to hide anything.

Long story short, college seemed so scary to me when I was in high school. It was way out of my comfort zone and I never liked that. I was shoved out of that comfort zone and I was forced to be myself and put myself out there. Now that I’ve been pushed out, I’m never looking back. I was comfortable in high school, sure, but now I’m happy. And happy is so much better.