Rejection.

When we associate rejection with college, we all picture the dreaded thin envelope that tells you that you have not been accepted to the school you wanted. We all imagine how heartbreaking, how demoralizing, how disappointing it must be to have a school tell you "no." That rejection, we think, is real college rejection. Once we have committed to our college of choice, we are done with college rejection.

What nobody wants to tell you, though, is that a worse form of rejection comes after college actually starts.

This type of rejection is a more disheartening "no," a harsher blow to your sense of self-worth. This type of rejection includes nights when people invite you to go out, only to tell you right before that you can't come because they're with "other friends." This type of rejection includes sitting at sporting events alone because people "already have groups for the game." This type of rejection includes prolonged weekends of isolation because everyone "doesn't know what they're doing" until you realize hours later that they actually did go to a party. Without you.

You feel as though you committed to the school that sent you an acceptance letter, but the school is still, in a way, rejecting you.

Growing up, I had always been nervous in social situations, scared to initiate conversations or plans, worried that people were not going to like me. Luckily, I had friends since my early days of elementary school and I was able to use them to foster new friendships. However, after traveling 225 miles west to a school that none of my friends were attending, I had to start from scratch to cultivate relationships. What people always told me was that if I overcame my nerves and tried to make plans with people, I would amass many new friends in a short time. What people never told me was that there was a good chance I would try to make plans and people would say "no" without giving me a chance.

During these dark stages of our college years, we wish that we had impersonal letters denying us, not real faces once we arrive at the schools of our dreams.

Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned in my first semester was that so many other people had faced losses too when making college friends. Some of the happiest, kindest, most sociable people I met at school struggled to make friends and had to deal with this rejection. While they may have plans every weekend and large friend groups, they told me the reality: college was not always that way. They had once felt stranded, helpless, isolated despite the 40,000 bodies that graced the campus each day. People had abandoned them, rejected them, isolated them. They overcame rejection.

Many people have "perfect" social lives at college because they never like to talk about all of the times they were rejected.

Behind all of the smiling faces that flood your Instagram feeds could be rejections that occurred hours, days, weeks, or years before the picture was taken. But the rejections happened. The clusters of friends who seem to enjoy every minute of college could have endured many "no"s and nights alone.

Believe me, at times it does seem like every person at college rejects you.

But I promise, after all the times you have been turned down, somebody will come along who accepts you just as you are.

The key to attaining those amazing friendships in college is to approach everybody with the same enthusiasm you had when meeting people before getting rejected. In the same way a college rejection cannot make you doubt your intelligence, those rejections cannot phase you, cripple your happiness, diminish your confidence, make you second-guess your intrinsic worth. These refusals are simply indicators that some relationships are just not meant to be.

And once these rejections pass, what is meant to be will be.