After four years of high school, you’re beyond ready to get out of there and to adventure on your own. It’s finally move in day and your parents leave but as the day goes on you’ll learn a few things.

1. Make friends before entering the dining hall.

2. The perfect spot doesn’t come easily.

It took multiple attempts to find the perfect spot for my ceramic elephant. It visited the desk, the dresser, and finally reached a landing spot on the 3rd shelf down above my desk. The mini fridge got to travel a little bit around the room testing out each outlet and every open location. No matter how many times you move your things, they’ll eventually find a place, eventually.

3. When you organize your things neatly in the desk drawer, then shut the drawer, it’s not so neat anymore.

4. Your unpacked stuff back in your room will haunt you until they find their home.

As a freshman, the college designs the orientation schedule to keep you active and meeting new people. It’s great. But during convocation and the party on the field you start to think about the unpacked clothes in your suit case just sitting in your room wanting to be put in drawers. All your books and brand new school supplies that you want to open like the gifts you get on Christmas day. It’s creates a whole world of emotions from excitement to anxiety.

5. Always be kind to the tension rod, you never know when it’ll fall on you.

6. The frame is fine being a little crooked.

The room is a solid 20 degrees warmer than you’d like it and you’ve worked up a sweat just from shuffling your big furniture around. Then it seems like fun, finally decorating the walls and making them a little less boring white. The command strips are perfectly stuck to the frame and you have it a nice 90-degree angle on the wall. It looks great. Onto the next command hook and frame. Then you take a step to look back at everything and the right side is a significant amount higher than the left side. Breathe. It’s perfect.

7. The mini fridge looks great in the closet.

8. You brought enough clothes.

After unpacking all of your suit cases, you sit there in awe and panic. The closet looks like it has an eight of your wardrobe and your dresser is barely full. None of the t shirts you brought match any of your shorts and the weather isn’t cooling down like you had thought. It takes a few days and nights to accept the number of clothes you have brought and to realize you can just go home and get more.

9. Step stools adding more than four inches to your height are way more important than you think.

10. No matter how hard you try, there’s going to be a puddle in your shower caddy.

This was a tough pill to swallow. Every shower you take a small little puddle remains in your shower caddy. Even after dumping water out after you shower, the next day there will be a puddle.

11. Making friends isn’t as hard as you thought it would be.