At every college campus all over the country, we do the same thing every year at the end of the semester. We struggle through the last of our exams while somehow packing up everything we own — sleeping on that one blanket with the last little pillow — and then we leave for the summer.

Assuming that we aren’t graduating or transferring, we say goodbye to all our friends for at least three months. We all go our separate ways, maybe exchanging a few phone calls or text messages throughout the summer, but for the most part, it’s like college life disappears in exchange for home-cooked meals and free laundry. By the time we’re ready to return, we start texting our friends more and more, figuring out details and wondering about class schedules, but even then, we can’t help but worry that our relationships feel a bit stiff. After all, we put our lives on hold for three months. It’s a natural reaction, one that you know/hope will wear off within the first few weeks back.

And that’s how it works every year. You show back up on campus, and then it’s like you never left.

But the fear that everything might have changed while you were gone for those three months is much more real — and much harder to ignore — if you went abroad for of one of those semesters.

Now, instead of three months, most of our campus lives — the friends and classmates that we worked so hard to get to know, the familiarity that we worried about so much our freshman year — were on hold for roughly eight months. Nearly an entire year passed by since the last time we were at “home” with our friends. Of course you did your best to keep up with them, but being across the world and busy with experiencing another culture will interrupt anyone’s regularly scheduled programming.

But now that our adventure is over and a new semester is beginning, it’s right back to all those things we left behind. For some, it’s a sigh of relief, to finally get to be back in the familiar place with all the people we know and love. For others, it’ exciting to return full of these new experiences, ready to take on anything with that “can-do” attitude we developed after traveling the world.

And even despite all that excitement, it’s terrifying.

While everyone else went back after break, you stayed out on your own. While everyone else got another five-or-so months to spend together and have fun, you were halfway across the world from it all. Of course we’d never trade the experiences we had for anything — but now that we’re faced with it, the idea that nothing will feel the same going back to campus is a daunting one.

You wonder if your friends will be quite as eager to catch up, or you worry about just how you might have changed. It feels familiar and alien all at once, and you can’t help but think that everything will be completely different than what your last few years have felt like. Your expectations are all over the place, and you have no idea what you’re going to walk into. In some ways, it feels like starting over, but in others it feels all-too-familiar.

And that’s the great part. Because we did spend a whole semester abroad. We came to it with crazy expectations — some that were met, and some that weren’t — and with plenty of fears — some that were real and some that faded away like nothing — but even then we made it through. We learned to figure it out and that getting lost along the way is usually all right too.

We went abroad and lived our crazy adventures and survived to tell the tale. We met people and made friends and learned so much, about ourselves and the world. Now it’s back to campus, and we’ll just have to do the same thing — but we can breathe easier this time — we’ve already got a good foundation of friends to fall back on.