About two weeks before the big "Move-In Day," you begin packing up the essentials for your dorm or apartment, seeing the last of your hometown friends, running errands with parents, and making sure your wardrobe is suitable for the first semester. You might have talked to a few people in your class over social media with plans to meet up once you arrive on campus or you might have kept to yourself planning to go into this new school year open to the experiences you are about to have with your new peers. Either way, you have done some pre-planning and want to start this school year prepared for whatever may be thrown your way. However, no amount of preparation or pre-planning can make you immune to the surprises from college life (or returning college life) that you are about to encounter.

I want to share with you an important lesson that I learned from going off to college that couldn't be planned and I couldn't prepare for it. I prepared and planned for college as much as I could: bought new room decor, figured out where to buy my textbooks, coordinated lunch times with a few friends, and pre-selected a few clubs that I was interested in joining. When August 21 rolled around, I was a bundle of nerves that hadn't gotten much sleep the night before and was awake before the rest of the household. As I began this new journey, I thought I had everything figured out, everything planned, and everything prepared. Well, Mary Washington had something different in mind for me and none of it fit into my carefully planned year.

After rushing a co-ed fraternity, volunteering to help with dogs and deciding to double major in math and English, I realized that my first year at Mary Wash was nothing like I had planned it to be. I went off schedule numerous times and participated in the spur of the moment activities that now cause me to realize that you can never be fully prepared for going off to college but you have been preparing the first 16 years of your life for it.

One of the most important things that you can do before you leave for college is tell your parents how much they mean to you and thank them for helping shape the person you are today. In supporting social skills, building academic skills, and discipline, parents can be credited with more of the preparation process than you can. They made sure you had your favorite toy in preschool, packed your lunch, helped you with your homework in grade school, and sat in a small puddle of tears as you walked across the stage to receive your diploma.

So, before you either begin this new college life or return to it, make sure you thank your parents for all that they have done in raising you and preparing you for college because, without them, you might not have known how to even begin preparing for your first year.