It’s senior year. It’s the moment you’ve been dreading since you walked through the doors of high school. It's the moment you thought was years away, but snuck up on you faster than you expected.

You guessed it: it’s time to start applying to colleges.

This process is much more than sending in an application. Before all that, you have to first decide how far away you want to be from home, if you want to commute, what kind of things you plan on majoring in, and in most cases, the amount of money it will cost you to go.

Of course, I thought about all these things, but another important part of going away to school was deciding if I wanted to spend the next four years with my twin sister.

When I first began the process of trying to figure out which school was right for me, I wondered where my sister and I would end up after we graduated. Would we be together at the same school, or miles apart?

At the time it seemed a bit uncertain, but in the end, we both knew there was no way we would be able to survive the next four years without each other. A lot of people told my sister and I that we needed to expand our horizons and experience college by ourselves.

I’m sure they said this mainly because you don’t see me without her or her without me. I guess they had a point, considering we are together pretty much 24/7. Regardless, here’s what I say to all of that.

For starters, we had already been roommates for the first 18 years of our lives, so why not add on four more? We were already so used to living with each other, and the thought of getting a random roommate freaked me out a little.

Having her with me made it feel a little bit like home. Another benefit of having her as my roomie meant more clothes for me to wear. That is always a plus.

Although we were away from home, it was nice to have my sister there while I adjusted to my new life as a college student. When away at school, we all get those moments of homesickness. This is inevitable, no matter how close or far you are from home.

If I ever got overwhelmed or felt that I was swamped with work, she always reassured me that I’d be fine. It was always nice knowing we were going through the college struggle together.

Of course, there will come a time in our lives when we must separate from each other and go out into the world following our own paths. But until that moment, I plan on taking full advantage of the friendship I was given from birth, a friendship that is unlike any other and one that I will clench onto for my entire life.

My sister is my support system, cheerer-upper, and one of the only people in my life that will tell me the blatant truth whether I want to hear it or not. Why would I ever choose to give that up when I was able to have it so close to me for a few more years, before starting our careers and going in different directions?

Now, I’m not saying that once we graduate from college our relationship will never be the same. But once we get into the real world, I know it’s possible it can change.

There is no one on the planet who gets me like she does. I mean that’s obvious, right? She’s my identical twin for crying out loud. Of course, she is going to understand me better than anyone else.

But the relationship we have is one that would suffer greatly if we were too far apart. There is just no way I would be able to survive the crazy world of college without her experiencing it with me.