Going to college is a thrilling time in your life. It’s the time when you’re able to discover your true interests and passions, forge a path for your future and have a taste of independence. College gives you a plethora of opportunities to help you pursue your endeavors and it’s up to you to decide whether or not to take those opportunities.
Not only is college a great time to determine what you love, but it is also a place to make lifelong friends. Entering your freshman year, everyone is so outgoing and willing to get to know you. What would typically take two years to really get to know your new friends back home happened within a semester. You learn all the little quirks about your friends that you’ve come to accept and love and you share a special bond that no other friendship could ever replicate. At the end of the year, you have a bittersweet taste in your mouth when it’s time to move out and go back home.
In college, you’re able to hang out with your friends wherever and whenever you want. You don’t have your parents constantly staying awake worried for you and wondering when you’ll be back home. Perhaps the only one “waiting” for you is your sleeping roommate back in your dorm. You’re always down to go to the gym at 10 pm, grab ice cream at 11 pm and head to a lounge to study at midnight with your friends. No one is really stopping you and you don’t really want anyone to prevent you from doing what you want. Of course, time management and discipline comes into the picture when things get carried away, but overall, you begin to love spontaneity and adventure.
Your friends are always accessible at school. They’re only a text away, a two-minute walk from your place or maybe they’re even living with you. Your friends are not only emotionally there for you, but they’re there physically as well. The constant presence of your friends makes you fall in love with college. You and your friends can procrastinate together, have sleepovers together and have meals together. Even though there's nothing like mom's cooking at home, there's something about the community that makes campus food taste better. So many memories are made within a short period of time, you look forward to the next couple of years with them.
When you move back home for summer break, you’re happy to be with your family again and have your own space once more. But that feeling of comfort and belonging is now shared between your home at school and your “home home.” Though being home with your parents is refreshing at first, the quiet and the repetitiveness of your summer life overwhelms the warm nostalgia of being home and you start to miss being at school.
There’s nothing like being with your friends and making memories together. The silence in your house is no longer calming but irritating. Some of your friends are back home in other states and you wish you could hang out with them but that would require hours of driving. Of course, summer gives you the time to hang out with your friends, but you won't be able to see them as often as you'd like due to distance. You miss the adventures with your friends and the laughs shared over stupid things. You sometimes think a week or two of summer break is all you need and you want to go back home. All you needed was a break from the schoolwork, not the social life. After all, summer break is just like college, just without the stress.
You think back to when you were a kid and all you wanted was for school to end so summer can begin. But now all you want is for summer to end and school to begin.
