You come home after your first long year away. Your freshmen year has been full of new experiences, high points, low points, sadness, stress and all of the crazy things that come along with your first year of college. As you load up your car and make your way back to your hometown, you can’t help but carefully plan out all the fun things you want to do once you’re reunited with your friends. If you’re dubbed as the planner of the group, you’re probably going to spend the first week calling your friends and deciding on a time and place to meet up. Your biggest hope is that everything will automatically be back to the way things were. But of course, time changes things and while your friends are still your friends, there is something that is different. When everyone finally comes back into town, you meet up for a night of reminiscing, laughter and the endless “how are you” questions. The one topic of discussion that never seems to simmer down is the one where everyone argues how much "college changed you."

This has got to be hands down one of the most frustrating things anyone could say to a returning college student. The frustration that ensues from these three words can send any student running back to their college town. Why? Because, isn’t that the point of college? Didn’t we all make a unanimous decision to go to new place where we were to experience new and life changing experiences? The point of packing up and moving to a new place was supposed to be to grow within ourselves, and with growth inevitably comes change. It’s a fact of life that with time, comes growth and maturity. The only other factor that comes into play when you go away to college is that you’re completely on your own without anyone telling you what you can and cannot do. The change that happens within you comes from being completely and utterly responsible for yourself and for your actions. It’s not a bad change, and if anything it is something to add to your experiences to either help you make better decisions in the future, or to give you the courage to choose fun activities that will help you get out of your shell. The growth that you experience in a new city comes from being thrown into a new and diverse group of people who openly share their own past experiences for the potential benefit of a new friendship. It's a beautiful thing to change because without it we would remain stagnant and complacent with the attitudes that we have been taught.

Going away for college in a new city or state is definitely the highlight of your formative years. You pack up all of your belongings and basically start over your entire life. If you’re lucky, one or two of your hometown friends move to the same city as you, and if you’re really lucky, one or two move to the same school as you. The next time you come in contact with a returning first year college student, ask how their year went and what their experience was like. But please stop mentioning how much we’ve changed as a bad thing. If there is one thing that college has taught us is that change is good and highly inevitable the only thing we can control is how we handle it.