It’s a little after 9 A.M. on August 26, 2017, and I’m driving alone down the Interstate, making the brief ten-minute trek from my hometown of Thompson to the (slightly larger) city of Grand Forks for move-in day at the University of North Dakota.

I’m listening to a playlist I had made the other night. I had been feeling sentimental, and so I’d aptly titled the playlist “Leaving Home.” But come on, I’ve had a lot on my mind the last few days, so could you really blame me? I’ve had so much on my mind, in fact, that I hadn’t even given a second thought to the big red battery warning light that had been looming over my dashboard the past few days.

So before I know it, my radio has cut out, my car is dying, and I’m pulling into a parking lot to be rescued by my parents, a mere three blocks from my assigned residence hall. Forget being anxious about starting college. I hadn’t even arrived and disaster had already struck. What else did freshman year have in store for me?

I hardly slept that first night. After meeting my new roommate and unpacking as much stuff as I could into the stuffy dorm room, I found myself lying awake for several hours — hot, sweaty, and anxious about just what the hell I was supposed to do now. And that’s more or less how I felt for a few weeks.

Despite my best efforts to meet as many people as I could, I could count on one hand the number of people I actually knew. Sure, I went to college classes, but I didn’t feel like a college student. Everyone around me seemed more prepared, more experienced, more mature. It was like I was still a high school kid, thrown into an adult’s world with hardly any explanation of what to do.

As happens with every scared-shitless freshman, though, I eventually met a few people. I started talking to some people from my wing. I found some guys to go to the gym with. I went to Denny’s at obscene hours of the night. All of this I did just so that I could get to know these people I was now living with.

Despite my lingering anxieties, I managed to settle into a rhythm. Of course, the classes were tougher than high school (I’m an engineering major, so Calc I hit me hard), but I found classmates to study with and managed to survive my first round of midterms. I’d even gotten used to the fact that every night, another fully-grown dude would be sleeping just a few feet away from me in my room. Not bad for a scared-shitless freshman.

I still had a lot of questions, though. Some of them were relatively trivial. Does anybody care if I leave class to use the bathroom? How does the bus schedule work? And perhaps more than anything, Why do so many dudes wear those tiny little shorts everywhere? Most of these questions I figured out pretty quick, although I’m not sure I’ll ever really know what the deal is with those shorts. But there were some bigger issues on my mind, too.

Despite the fact that I’d actually made friends in my dorm, I worried that my peers didn’t understand who I really was. I always felt like I was “on” around these people — always mindful of everything, always trying to make a good impression. It was kinda exhausting, actually.

But despite all the doubt and uncertainty of first semester, I actually had a blast. College life, I’d found, was crazy and entirely unlike anything I’d known before, but I’d grown accustomed to it. Whether my buddies and I were pushing each other around in Wal-Mart carts at one in the morning or drifting cars across the ice-covered parking lots, it seemed like there was always some adventure waiting for me just beyond my suite door.

I got through my first finals week alive, I went to a Christmas dinner with the friends I’d made in my wing, we said our goodbyes for the holidays, and I left for home on a brisk, snowy Saturday afternoon. And immediately, I came to the conclusion that home was just so . . . boring.

Look, I love my family, and I really enjoyed spending more time with them again over Christmas break. I got to hang out with my younger brothers, catch up with some high school friends I hadn’t seen for awhile and put things like calculus out of my mind for just about a month. But going from the breakneck pace of dorm life to having absolutely nothing to do for three weeks . . . I honestly just about lost it. Never mind the fact that it was weird being back in my parents' domain now that I was a little more independent.

Suffice to say, that by the time winter break finally ended, I had grown eager to return to college life. Little did I know, however, what was in store for me back at UND.

The first few weeks back in Grand Forks were great! I had been worried it would be weird seeing my new friends again when actually, it was like nobody had ever left. The first night back, about twenty of us went to Buffalo Wild Wings together (not a sponsorship, but damn, those parmesan garlic wings are good…)

After catching up with everyone, it seemed like my second semester was gearing up to be even more fun than my first. And then, in the span of a few weeks, the metaphorical shit hit the allegorical fan.

It started with a really dumb car accident in late January. January 17, actually. I’ll probably remember that date for a while. I ended up totaling my car, a 1999 Plymouth Breeze (it had been on its last legs for awhile), and suddenly, my life seemed a whole lot more complicated. Not only did I find myself constantly bumming rides from friends, I actually had to save money for a new car now.

And that was just the start of it. A week or so after that accident, I got the grade back on my first physics exam. This was the first college exam I ever totally bombed, and that was kinda a shock. Turns out I had spent the first month back at UND still in holiday mode, and I had forgotten that Oh yeah, classes actually take work. So it seemed like I would be spending a lot less time hanging out with friends this semester and a lot more time alone, studying. Great.

To exacerbate this whole situation, some personal drama and the return of a nagging injury only added to my load. But in the words of an inspirational Instagram post, I found a while back,

Isn’t Instagram wisdom just the best? But anyway, the gist of this part of the story is that this last semester quickly proved to be a whole lot more stressful than the first. That late February-early March stretch was probably the worst of it: there were lots of late nights studying for midterms, and we still had a ways to go. Don’t get me wrong, I still found time to have fun with my friends. But by the time spring break finally arrived, I was ready for another time-out.

By the way, “Spring Break” is a misleading term in North Dakota. It should really just be called “A Second, Smaller Winter Break.” But that’s a rant for another day.

Where was I? Oh yeah, spring break. After a mostly quiet week at home, I returned back to UND yet again for the last two months of class. And things started looking up again. I’d (mostly) gotten the hang of these tougher classes, and by late April, I was able to buy a new car (2008 Dodge Avenger . . . I’ve named it Quicksilver). I made plans with a fellow engineering major from my wing to lease a house next fall.

Now, I just had two things left to do this semester: get through finals week in one piece, and find as much time as I could to hang out with my dorm friends before we all went our separate ways.

Honestly, the last few weeks of the semester really flew by. Between all the studying for finals, hanging out with friends, and getting altogether less sleep than a doctor would recommend, I was surprised to finish up my last 8 A.M. final yesterday and realize that Wow, it’s actually all coming to a close now. It was time to pack up and leave for home.

So as I stood there in the tiny room that had become my home for the past few months, packing up my underwear and taking down my Baby Driver movie poster, one thought seemed to outweigh all the others: I’m really gonna miss this, but also it’s about time to go.

My freshman year had been the perfect roller coaster analogy: insanely stressful but weirdly invigorating, full of amazing highs and gut-churning lows, and the whole thing seemed to go by just a little too fast. So as I return home to my small town of Thompson, with one year of college in the bag, I’m still trying to sort out where I am now and what I’ll do next.

For starters, I’ll probably just be bored as hell for most of the summer. As for where I’m at now, that’s a little tougher to figure out. I’m definitely not the same high school kid whose car broke down a block from campus, but I’m also pretty sure I don’t feel like an adult just yet. I guess that means I’m probably just a college kid, after all.

So if I had to sum it all up in some kind of useful life lesson, I’d say . . . oh, I don’t know. Probably something about pushing your personal limits and being open to new experiences. But really, who cares? I’ve never really been big on overt themes in articles like this.

If the ultimate purpose of the past eight months has just been so I can tell you, “Here are 5 Things I Learned During Freshman Year,” then honestly, it’s probably been a big waste of time for the both of us.