Dear friends,
College is a time of transition and it can be extremely difficult to go through alone. It’s like getting into a car that only goes at 100mph and doesn’t have any brakes – everything happens really fast and there’s a lot of responsibility to handle. Suddenly, you’re in charge of doing your own laundry, feeding yourself, grocery shopping, and remembering to shower. In a word, it’s hard. The first friends you make in college, in my opinion, are the most important ones. They are the ones that get you through pangs of homesickness, late nights of studying for your first midterms, and the general struggle that accompanies being a college student.
Although I don’t show it much, college has been one of the toughest journeys I have embarked upon as of yet. I really did not know what I was getting myself into by leaving everything I knew so suddenly. In the movies, the college process appears so seamless. The protagonist seems to be totally okay with being away from home, magically gets invited to a frat party on the first day of school, and joins an award-winning a capella group before the first semester is even over. Thanks, Hollywood, for the most unrealistic portrayal of college. Here's the reality: I miss home and my family more with each passing day, and loneliness impresses itself upon me every so often. This difficulty I’ve been faced with, though, has been easy to mask with smiles and laughs that you are responsible for. Over the past three months, you have become family to me, you make me forget about what’s bringing me down, and that is something for which I will be forever indebted to you.
I came to this school with no one. I was venturing far away from home, becoming a little fish in a very, very large pond. Somehow, I was fortunate enough to find the best group of fish in this pond of 30,000. Friends reading this, you know who you are. Words cannot properly describe how much I appreciate you and everything you’ve done for me in the short months I have known you – whether you know it or not. Moreover, I’d like to say thank you. Thank you for accepting me for being my genuine and authentic self and still choosing to be friends with me. Thank you for making me feel more at home in an unfamiliar place. Thank you for buying me ice cream at 1:30am. Thank you for listening to my rants about boys. Thank you for literally wiping tears off of my face. Thank you for making me smile every single day. At home, I have a mug that says “in the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips” – so one final thank you is in order: thank you for being my chocolate chips.
