As my dad often liked to remind my sister and I as we grew up, "you become who you hang around with." While I never fully understood this sage advice as a child, I've definitely come to understand its significance within the past few years. As in most cases, people grow up to be products of their environments. One of the most impactful aspects of a personal environment is the people in it. Specifically, the people outside of family that you spend the most time with. My friends have always been those people.

In high school, I would see my friends 7 hours a day, five days a week, and even on weekends sometimes. That's a lot of time to spend with people. From studying in the library to taking coffee-break trips during our free hour, we bonded over arguably the most formative years of our lives. Due to the amount of time we spent together, it's easy to understand how influential we could be on each other. Truthfully, I was privileged to meet such high-quality girls. Having dependable, solid friends from a young age showed me what I should look for and expect from the people closest to me.

Fast forwarding to college, I've once again found myself surrounded by the same groups of people all the time; and I'm not complaining. My roommates and classmates are with me 24/7. Fortunately for me, they're all great people to be stuck with. I consider myself lucky to have found people who share so many of the same priorities and aspirations in life. We uphold each other to the standards we've set, and we also help each other reach the goals we've set. If I had to spend my college career around the same people, I'm glad they're people who've pushed me to live up to the potential my college experience.

While having a consistently excellent group of friends throughout my life has worked much to my favor, there can be serious consequences on the flip side. My dad always made it a point to stress the importance of who our friends were because he understood how much influence they would have. Although I've always found true gems of friends, surrounding myself with apathetic and unmotivated people could've easily steered me in a detrimental direction.

I can only hope that future me is able to find the same caliber of people like my high school and college friends. Of course, I'll always have these people; they're forever friends. However, the bar has been set incredibly high for my future friends.

In all, I'd just like to thank my friends, whether we talk every day or not. I'm the person I am today because of you all.