Going into college, you really don’t know who you are. I can honestly say I am not the same person I was when I signed the papers with my college, and that is completely fine.You go into college thinking you will have all the same best friends, all the same habits, and all the same goals in life. In all reality, EVERYTHING will change.
You leave your family and friends in hopes to get a degree to make a life for yourself. You might be the first child to ever go to college and it will put so much stress on you (I’m talking from experience). You spend the summer before college making memories with the people you have made a life together because you know you are going away. College changes everything.
Your move in day will be a crazy and eventful day. You walk your dorm halls meeting all these new, scared people that you are going to live with for a whole year. You move all your stuff in from your home many miles away and watch your parents finally let their son/daughter go. It seriously does not hit you until the night of, when you are unpacking and you don’t have your parents telling you that dinner is done. Then it hits you--your real life has finally begun.
You start to get in the groove of everything: waking yourself up on your own, living with someone you barely know, and living off of food that was cooked for hundreds of students. You might start developing new habits, bad habits that you know your parents would have yelled at you for. You start staying up late on test night because your favorite T.V. show is on, you start to find new friends that want to party. You start understanding what college life is really like. You think you knew stress before, but you are about to be hit with a brick wall. College is stressful.
You start going home less often and going out more on the weekends. Your texts and calls with your family and friends become less frequent and you begin to love the new family-away-from-home. You don’t really start to realize how many people you have lost until you come home and sit around the house for the weekend with zero plans with your home friends. You then realize life has changed.
You get more excited about your parents sending you back to school with laundry money than you ever did about having change in your wallet. You spend your free time drinking coffee and late nights working on homework that might already be overdue. You sit in your lectures, day after day, and forget what the professor said five minutes before. You start knowing faces from classes and end up making dates to the dining hall together. You start to know street names and the cheapest gas around campus. You start to realize your new home isn’t all that bad after all.
Your family and friends might not notice you’re having the time of your life, but also the hardest time of your life. While trying to find yourself and who you want to be, you are having to make it all happen in four years. You have roughly eighteen years to choose a college, but so little time to figure out what you want to do with your life.
So, advice from a student already a year deep, enjoy it. Enjoy all the hard nights, failed tests, and new friends. College is all fun and games until you’re sitting at graduation wondering where all the time went. Cherish all the different people you meet and look forward to spending hours of drives back home with your family telling them all about it. College isn’t free, but finding yourself and loving yourself is. Enjoy it while it lasts.
