Your college experience will not be perfect.

It will not be the way you see it in the movies. You will not have flawless, shampoo commercial hair and go to class looking like a supermodel every day. You will not join a sorority that has a best friend fraternity and an ENEMY sorority and breathe drama like air. You will not fall in love with the dreamy professor, only to have your heart broken when you realize that it’s an impossible affair, only to have your heart UNBROKEN when the cute swimmer from accounting asks for your number.

Instead, during your freshman year, you will have an existential crisis and end up locked in your dorm for a week, eating ice cream and crying at Grey’s Anatomy so loudly that they hear you on the floor below. Your sophomore year someone will stalk you to your apartment, and you will have to call the police, and one of the officers will be very kind but the other will patronize you. You will remember the look in his eyes. Your senior year, just a month away from graduation, you will sleep through a midterm. Yes, the whole thing.

Am I projecting? Maybe. But the fact remains:

There is this dream about the way that college is supposed to look, and it is a lie. The difference between what college is supposed to be and how it actually turns out is a lot like the difference between your outfit on the first day of school and your outfit during finals week: one makes a good impression, but the other is THE REAL DEAL (feat. makeup from two days ago and a stain on your shirt from instant noodles). Just like anything else in your life, plans tend to look better on paper than they ever play out in the real world.

This is not to say you shouldn’t plan. You should. In fact, it’s essential. But I would also suggest adjusting your brain right now— whether you’re an incoming freshman or in your sixth year of college— to accommodate a much bigger vision of what the college experience can be.

Maybe you’ll find that you can’t graduate in four years. That’s okay. For whatever reason you need more time to grow and gain what you need to from university. Comparing yourself to the pace of others doesn’t prove anything. You have different needs and different circumstances. Your college experience is not diminished because you have to stick around longer than you initially anticipated. If anything, it may be augmented.

Maybe you’ll need to take a break from college for a little while. Guess what: it will still be waiting when you decide it’s time to come back. Whether your reasons are financial, health-related, personal, or something in-between, there is absolutely no shame in taking a step back for a while. As cliche as it may sound, college is not a race to graduation. If you reduce it to that, then what are you really experiencing at all?

Maybe you’ll have to work through college, leaving you little time to be involved with campus life or establish a wide circle of friends. You do whatever you have to do to keep moving forward, and that is admirable. Your college experience is just as valid as Sabrina on the speech team or Hector in Theta Chi. You know what you need to do to build a life for yourself, and you’re doing it. That’s exactly what college is all about.

Maybe you came to college for a social experience as much as an academic one. Maybe you were focusing too much on academics to be involved on-campus. Maybe you want to be so involved that you barely have time to sleep. Maybe graduation take you three years, or five, or eight. It doesn’t matter.

Think about what you want to get out of college. Think about the education you want to gain, the relationships you want to build, the causes you want to support. Now do that. No matter how winding the road may lead, whatever you do on the path to graduation can become a perfect college experience, tailor-made for you. It doesn’t have to look like the movies. In fact, I think that it would kind of suck.

During my three years in college, I have learned to exist more comfortably inside my own skin. I learned to be a leader and a professional. I learned to be a better friend. My self-confidence and self-esteem both grew in spades. I met some of the most incredible people I have ever known. I learned things I never would have thought to seek out otherwise, both inside my classrooms and outside. My college experience may not have been picture perfect, but it was exactly what I needed to begin becoming the kind of person I have always wanted to be. That should be your goal, not fulfilling some arbitrary, cookie cutter image of excellence.

In spite of the Netflix-related meltdowns and botched alarms, I wouldn’t have wanted college to go any other way.