I remember telling my dad I was going to live in my sorority house after my freshman year. He was rightfully confused to wonder why I would be submitting myself to living with 53 girls and sleeping in a sleeping porch with 40 of them. I was pretty confused, too, honestly.

I had just lived in a dorm with a roommate 10 feet away from me at all times, so why would I want to severely increase the number of roommates I would be having?

Well, I had heard from all the older members of my chapter that it was the best experience they had ever had, and I cannot even begin to explain how right they were. My dad eventually got on board with the idea, and I was set to go.

Sophomore year of college, I lived with my 53 best friends in a princess castle.

Going into this experience, I was really only close with one other girl in my member class. I was absolutely terrified to try and make new friends because it felt like everyone else already had their friends, so why would they need one more? For the first few months of my live-in experience, I didn’t really branch out.

Quite honestly, I wasn’t having a good experience, and it definitely wasn’t what I wanted from living in. I didn’t understand how these older members could tell me about how amazing their experiences were when I couldn’t experience it for myself.

Towards the end of winter term, I was tired of feeling like this, and I knew I had to change things for myself. I realized I had been waiting for girls to approach me to hang out when in truth, I hadn’t been putting myself out there enough.

I knew it was on me at this point, so I made a conscious effort to hang out in common areas and to meet new girls. Let me tell you right now, I met the best group of friends I have ever had, and I realized how wrong I had been about the experience.

Living in my sorority house taught me a multitude of things about myself and about others. First of all, I had a harsh realization that making an experience what you want comes from within. I was feeling like I didn’t have close friends because I wasn’t putting myself out there, not because girls didn’t want to know me.

Second, I learned how to live with a plethora of different personalities and backgrounds. No one of the 53 of us was the same, but we had to find a way to live with one another. Some were clean and somewhere messy, some were night owls and some were morning birds, yet at the end of the day, we were all making our live-in experience something we wanted from it.

I have no regrets about living in my sorority house. While it was a rough start, it taught me the most about myself and how to meet people. Now that I live out, I am actually shocked about how much I miss it.

There will never be another experience in my life where all of my friends and I live together in a mansion. There was always someone to get dinner with, do homework with, or go on an adventure with. Looking back on my time as a live-in, I realize how many experiences and opportunities I never would have had if I had opted out of the experience altogether.