After entering into college, you are expected to “grow up”, or have “grown up” already. Many have, many have not and many others are somewhere in the middle. Throughout this time, there are many experiences to be had, many mistakes to be made and many lessons to be learned.

Life does not stop when something happens that makes your world stop. As a kid, or even a teenager, living at home, if something tragic occurred in the life of you or your family, you got “time off”. Perhaps you did not have to go to school, or you were allowed to have a day to regroup. In the grown up world, life does not stop as it seemingly did when you were younger. You are still expected to put yourself together, go through the motions of your everyday life, and eventually move on. It is more difficult to do so, but it is reality. Your boss won’t tell you to not come into work for a week because your dog passed or you rear-ended someone. You still have a life with responsibilities that must be taken care of.

You can no longer only focus on school, there are many other responsibilities. In college, there’s more to school than just school. When you want to move off campus, you have to do all the research and put in the time and effort to find a place to live, find roommates that will share a lease with you, earn the money to pay for that housing with, etc. That also means that you need, or have, a paying job. So on top of school work, your job, making sure you are fed and have had enough sleep, and try to have a social life, you still have, what seems like, a million other things to do. It is kind of infuriating when learning how to deal with everything at once; but it must be done. Hopefully it gets easier as we all gain experience doing it.

Time flies when you’re having fun. Going through grade school (especially middle school and high school) feels like it takes an eternity. Once in college, time absolutely flies by. College is not always fun, but most everyone is always busy. It is hard to believe that all of a sudden you are a junior in college, having to think about internships, the possibility of graduate school, and applying to real life, grown up jobs and/or careers. It’s crazy. Just when you feel like you’ve gotten the hang of college, the rug is ripped out from under your feet. And guess what? While worrying about graduate school, a real life, full time job, and whatever else you have on your plate – you STILL have to find a place to live (again), pay your bills and keep yourself taken care of.

I am slowly discovering that most adults just have to wing it at life and hope things go as planned. It’s an interesting way to do things, but sometimes it is the only option. I’m convinced that no one really knows what to do 100% of the time. I guess we just have to sit back, take on our responsibilities as members of society, and try to enjoy the ride.