Growing up, I never realized how much college would impact me. I would watch the movies and see a girl fall in love with a boy, join a sorority, and graduate with an amazing group of lifelong friends she had met in the first week of being at school. I thought my college experience would be based off a movie in my head that would have me peaking in life as I entered the pre-adulthood stage of my life. Oh, boy was I wrong. Here are ten things that the first semester of college taught me.

1. You will fail 

Okay before I get attacked for being so basic, I honestly thought that this was just a saying people said because they had sucky study habits. Failing can come in so many shapes and forms, and believe me I have failed before, but never in an academic sense. Ever since I started school over thirteen years ago, I have always strived for the best. There was something in me that craved validation from my teachers. Then the first ever college test hit me, and I got a big fat "F" on it. I was devastated. I had been going to class every day and had studied for hours for this one test. I didn't realize that without failure you wouldn't learn. I couldn't comprehend that getting that one bad grade would actually be beneficial to me in the end run.

2. You won't meet your best friends on the first day 

Making friends is a lot harder than it was in kindergarten when you could bond over your love of crayons or that you watched Harry Potter last night. Now walking into a room of strangers sends a shock of anxiety into people as their back sweats and they can't form a sentence. The first day of college is move-in day, and everyone is busy with their parents organizing their closets and picking up expensive books they will only read once. Meeting friends now is full of complicated stages of checking out their social media and trying to find their sense of humor. But just because you didn't find your new group on the first day doesn't mean that something is wrong with you.

3. Roommates aren't for everyone 

Okay, let me say this, having to share a room barely big enough to not be considered a pantry is hard. Bumping into each other, going around their sleeping schedules and declaring what is and isn't okay is hard to do. Don't feel ashamed if you can't take it anymore and find a loophole of moving in with other friends, by yourself, or in with your sorority or frat. Having a personal space is one of the fundamental things that makes us human.

4. Old friends won't be as available 

The stage of letting go of old friends and not being able to talk to your high school friends as often hits hard during the first semester of college. Your old high school group is split up, and at different colleges and even stages of life. You now have new inside jokes, a new shoulder to cry on, and new people you trust. The daily facetime calls slowly dwindle down to weekly, biweekly, ultimately stopping altogether. Now you can look at this one, of two ways: you can wallow in the loss of friends, or you can smile at the past of the fact that you are a new person. Losing friends is ever easy, but a change in life is always welcome.

5. You will have the best time of your life 

As the freedom seeps in, you can't help but smile at all of the new possibilities of your life. You can come and go as you please, find what you like, meet new people, and try new things. You have nothing holding you back and a fresh start to reinvent yourself.

College is not like the movies. You probably won't meet the love of your life at a frat party or become best friends with a professor after one class. But you will meet amazing people who make you feel like more of yourself than you have in a while. Becoming an adult comes with its own set of responsibilities, while we are in the in-between stages us college students need to take advantage of the first-semester freedom that we felt on the first day.