It's no surprise that college is meant to be an exciting time, where all the troubles of high school are over, and a new chapter is ready to be written.

It's a fresh start, to discover yourself, meet your lifelong friends, do and be who you couldn't be in high school, find your soulmate, and pursue a possible career.

Whether we like to admit it or not we all have expectations, some different than others, but nevertheless we all go in with these hopes.

But we can become deeply discouraged when the expectations we had don't come true, or if we see them happening around us, but not to us personally.

College isn't always the great experience we hoped for or the fun, carefree chapter where we are continuously meeting lifelong friends, and discovering exciting new things.

Prince Charming isn't always at college.

You don't always find your life path.

Sometimes you lose more friends than you make and discovering yourself ends up being a much messier process.

In fact, the whole thing is a process, and the journey of finding yourself and discovering what you want to be is much more difficult and frustrating than the TV shows portray it to be.

Your mom, sister, or best friend may have met the loves of their lives in college, and you didn't.

You may have been the honors student in high school, and are now missing class, and trying to keep your grades up.

Or you may have thought to go to college meant a group of friends would be awaiting your arrival, excited to take on college with you and be disappointed to discover you've only made one or two good friends.

Ring by spring and all that crap isn't reality,

It can happen, sure...

But we all have a story, and that may not look the same as everyone else's.

Don't be discouraged when all the misconceptions prove themselves to be misconceptions.

Don't be discouraged if your college journey is messy and if finding yourself meant taking a lot of wrong turns, and making a lot of poor choices, because we've all been there.

Have hopes and aspirations, reach your goals, and work hard to achieve them, but don't lose sight of reality, and be open to change.

Don't be so caught up in the misconceptions that you lose sight of what matters, and you miss out on opportunities, and maybe even people because you're chasing something that doesn't truly exist.

We all want success in one way or another, but in between all of our goals and aspirations we have a life, and we need to live it to the fullest, and not miss out because we excluded ourselves too much, or gave up.

So maybe you didn't get your ring by spring or make as many friends as you had hoped, maybe you switched your major a million times, and slipped up a couple times, but that's just apart of the journey.

And we can either get caught up in these crazy misconceptions, and have all these high expectations, or we can live, we can experience, and be open to whatever comes, and whatever doesn't come our way.