Living with other people is hard. Living with new people is even harder, imagine doing it twice. For most upperclassman a new semester means coming back to school and living with their best friends that they've made throughout college, but for the few like me I'm with a completely new set of roommates. I'm usually never anyone's first pick, so it wasn't shocking to find out all of my friends had already made living arrangements before I could even think about it. That meant I was on my own to find a new roommate for the next year.

In the end I found a small group of girls for a suite, but it was like freshman year all over again. I didn't know them, they didn't know me, and none of my friends had ever even seem to have heard of them before. Little to say, I was scared. Fast forward to move in weekend where I was even more terrified than freshman year. At least then everyone was in the same boat, but here I was in a group of girls who were already best friends. I moved in the day before everyone else and I think that made it worse. When all of my suit mates moved in something changed. Within the first few hours I felt accepted and it genuinely felt like they wanted me there. They introduced me to all of their friends and made it seem like I was always there with them since day one.

It has been about a week with them and I couldn't feel more at home. In one week these girls have managed to turn every fear an doubt completely around for me and have never made me feel excluded in the smallest bit. And that is really hard because I always feel excluded even when I'm not. They have already turned my entire sophomore year around and I couldn't be more grateful.

The moral of the story here is that even if things don't go your way, there is always a silver lining and everything happens for a reason. Sometimes we put so much pressure and so much negativity into something thats happened that we never think it might be a good thing. Sometimes we do the opposite. We get so excited and set the bar extremely high for something we think is good, only to be let down. It truly is a never ending cycle. What can break the cycle is changing your perspective. I thought living with new people would be the absolute worst thing ever, but my expectations were completely wrong.

We put so much into the smalls things that we forget the bigger picture, and we also forget to smile a the little things. We would never know if we've experienced something good, if we've never experienced something bad.

So this is a thank you to my new suite mates for completely turning my year around and making everything turn around for me!