From the time I can recall people asking me what I wanted to do after I graduated high school, I said I wanted to go to college. Ha, go to college. It’ll be fun they said. So I did. I packed up my big bedroom in my parents cozy home and moved to cramped apartment with a shared kitchen.

I’ve grown up a lot from the scared little freshman girl I once was, which is a slight victory. Those small victories are few and far between what I experience now a days. After moving away from my town of roughly 400 people give or take one, I go to a school with over 35,000 students who all are some of the best scholastic peers in the state of Missouri. What a better way to feel humble and bring yourself back down to earth when everyone is as smart or smarter than you.

But how do we do it you may ask? How do we balance school and everything we’re involved in? Let me just tell you we are all magicians. The general assumption is that when you go to a large SEC school such as Mizzou is that all we do is party, smoke drugs, and mess around. Yes, I did say smoke drugs because why not add smoking and drugs into smoke drugs. Anyhoo, the silver-lining is that we don’t all do that crap.

Wanna know how I survive? Coffee, lots and lots of coffee and then when I get tired of coffee I switch to London Fogs. I also survive on the tears that I cried from the day before in my French class where I can spend 50 minutes and not understand a single word. Yet, I’m still held responsible to understand what my professor meant, get tested over the material, speak the language, and write essays. Sound fun to you? You say no? That’s what I thought.

How do college students who go to school for anywhere from 12-18 hours a week, study another 2 + hours on top of that for each class they’re in, manage to have friends, eat dinner, sleep, shower, attend mandatory meetings, join a sorority or a frat, see family who don’t live in the same town as you, work a part time job, work a full time job, see that new movie we’ve been dying to watch, carve pumpkins and drink a lot of PSL, make time to attend MIZ football games, and study some more?

How do we do it? Because many would assume you’d need crack cocaine for all of that *crap*! But I don’t like drugs because I don’t want to go to jail. All the while we have friends, coworkers, peers, and family telling us to get more involved in school. Spend more time studying, spend more time going to the tutors, spend more time working out because we’re gaining weight from stress eating our sorrows away. So we literally have our days planned out minute by minute as to how we’re going to spend our day. Teachers are down our backs about our grades and how the class average keeps getting lower and lower with each passing test, yet still, we're told to do more, think more, know more, see more.

The older I get and the more that I experience the grandeur of college, the more I come to realize how little our grades really do matter. Your grades do not define you. Repeat after me, "My grades do not define me." If you have to, write it on a post-it, read it every single day, or meditate this to yourself.

Either way, have to power to believe in your greatness, your accomplishments, and your victories in life. Remember your experiences and how you treat others will be how people remember you by.