Being sick in college sucks. You can feel it coming on, that slight tickle in your throat and the aches that are more than just your latest gym workout. You start feeling abnormally winded (at least more than usual) walking up the Tolentine stairs. As you shotgun Emergen-C packets and chug down green tea, there's only one thing on your mind: please don't let me get quarantined by the health center.

It's Tuesday morning, and you wake up feeling like you just got hit by a bus. Hope you aren't hungover, just suffering from the most intense cold that has ever hit your body. Your throat is burning and your head is pounding as if someone's flashing strobe lights in your face. Your whole body feels like a bag of bricks and the cough coming out of you sounds like you smoke 10 packs a day.

You pull up WebMD and Google symptoms: Strep throat? Mono? Bronchitis? Meningococcal? The flu? Probably all of the above, with a small bit of pink eye thrown into the mix. If you haven't had this classic mix of every possible college-born disease, then you haven't fully lived through your freshman year yet.

It happens to us all, and it's as natural as losing your baby teeth. College is a petri dish of diseases and coming in as a freshman, your immune system is being tested more than it ever has before. Add in a severe lack of sleep, stress from being in a new environment, schoolwork, along with living 2 feet away from a stranger and sharing a bathroom with 20 others, there's absolutely no way to escape it - besides maybe commuting.

There is one positive, however. Once you make it through that first real sickness, what will easily be the hardest part of your first year, nothing can break you. Not only does your immune system take it up 1,000 notches, but your mental state and overall emotions towards being sick will no longer have you crying to go home to your parents. You are a self-sufficient and independent college student, you are one tough cookie.

Plus, once you figure out the market has NyQuil, DayQuil, AND Mucinex, as well as a vast assortment of fruity cough drops and motivational tissue boxes, you will be set to take on any future college-epidemics that may hit you. Wash your hands, drink fluids, and may the odds be ever in your favor.