Last year, I was convinced everyone was exaggerating. The sophomore slump couldn’t be real. The people who were experiencing it just weren’t friends with the right people. Right?

No. Wrong. The "sophomore slump" is real — its life altering — and permeates in everything.

And frankly, it’s getting real old

For me, the "sophomore slump" was late onset. I just started experiencing it recently, but I have friends who have been dealing with it since syllabus week last semester.

Sophomore year I started as dewy-eyed and excited as I did freshman year. I just changed my major; things were going to be great. I had so many new things in my life, and the people were going to be great. And they were, and it was. It reached and achieved all of my expectations, but yet I am still experiencing the sophomore slump.

The best way I can describe the "sophomore slump" is watching everyone I love have emotional breakdowns, realizing our lives are a mess and then slowly deteriorating as human beings.

When this hits, you hate every class, dread waking up, and more than anything want to have a break, but that break never comes. So you’re left trudging through mud, in flip flops.

This isn’t to say every sophomore I know is on the edge of an existential crisis, but it is to say that every sophomore I know is struggling with something on some level. But in the grand scheme of things, I guess everyone is in some regard. It just happens to be vastly more melodramatic in the sophomore slump.

For me, the sophomore slump is trouble with school, general exhaustion, fear about not getting a job and not knowing if I want to go abroad, all simmering in this soup of sadness that creates a mediocre year. And I know I’m not alone. One of my best friends started the year upset about living arrangements and is ending the year wishing she hadn’t gone to CUA. However, we both share the mutual satisfaction of watching our countdown app tick away the time left until we graduate. In case you were wondering graduation is roughly 811 days away, summer is 73 days away and spring break is almost five days away. We’re so close. We’ve got this.

So my fellow sophomores, hang in there. May the slump be ever in your favor and remember only 73 more days until the sophomore year is over. Hopefully, junior year will be just as exciting as freshman year!