Remember when you were little and you were learning to ride a bike without training wheels? You had the elbow pads, the knee pads, the helmet, and you were ready to pound the pavement… literally. Your mom or dad began by holding the back of your little bike seat while running beside you as you peddled with all your might, placing all your trust in them. As they let go, you would feel your first rush of freedom, you'd forget to focus on balance or to watch for that ditch up ahead, but luckily you had on knee pads, so you were only a little bruised up. You would hop back on, telling your parent to really not let go this time, but they would, and you wold fall again. This cycle would repeat over and over until you finally were able to do all the necessary steps simultaneously.

When I think back on learning how to ride a "big girl bike," I am reminded of the many feelings of current college students. Right now, as we begin a new semester, we want to do all we can to either maintain similar grades to last semester, or really buckle down this time. Right now, as every Freshman has been through a semester of college, our training wheels have to come off, and all our protective gear must go on. Now, we don't get spoon fed information or handed study guides (unless you're lucky), instead we are forced to dive into the information for ourselves. It seems as though the person holding our bike seat last semester, making sure we didn't fall, decided that we were ready to face this world head on, even if we weren't ready to hit the books. However, college isn't only about books. College is about becoming who you want to be and making your future how you imagine. This is the time in your life when you are able to have someone help you out of the ditch and back onto the bike when you fall off.

If you're like me, all of a sudden you're in a ditch overwhelmed with work and its only syllabus week. You have no idea how you are going to make it through another day of classes, much less a semester. But then you can be reminded to get back on the bike. College is hard, and I’m not even in the hard stuff yet. College is definitely not for the faint of heart and requires exhausting amounts of efforts to preform how you think is expected to receive the potential career you are aiming for. However, when the assignments pile up, the reading is more than you can bear, and life doesn't go your way, realize things can only get better from here. When life becomes a mess and nothing seems to be going our way, we have to realize that life is as short as a bike ride, and we need to enjoy every second of it, even the bumps and bruises.