As a senior in high school, I used to hate it when kids would come home from their first semesters of college full of three-month old “wisdom” and spitting out Tweets that contained phrases like “Back when I was in high school…” It annoyed me that people who were barely a year older than me could act like they had gained so much knowledge in such short period of time, like they had changed so much since walking the same halls as me.

But now, after my own first quarter of college (yes, quarter— my school is weird), I now see that I was a little shortsighted.

The fact of the matter is that college is a catalyst for change, and a powerful one at that. Living in a dorm with a ton of other people, large lecture halls and killer exams, being on your own— change is engrained into every sector of day-to-day life, so obscure sometimes that we never take the opportunity to realize it. It’s only when the pace slows down, say, on the plane ride home, where we can look back and startle ourselves with how much we’ve grown in the past couple months.

And man, did I grow.

For one thing, I’m so much more comfortable with myself. In high school, no matter who you are, you are faced with the constant pressure to conform, to be self-conscious enough as to consistently fact check yourself against the status quo, and social media either makes or breaks you. But in college, people realize that the search for who they really are is more vital than the search for how to best imitate an already existing persona; as a result, an atmosphere of weirdness and creativity is born from people excitedly flexing their true personalities, many for the first time. It suddenly becomes ok, encouraged even, to make mistakes in this journey for the self, because mistakes are just the instructive byproduct of working hard for what you want.

But I certainly didn’t see mistakes that way at first, and I’m definitely still trying to figure out which parts of my personality are inherently mine and which are society’s. That’s another change— failure develops from an infrequent, fervently avoided outcome to a frequent, realistically unavoidable motif of life. I failed to get into the clubs I liked, to get the grades I wanted, and to achieve the level of contentment I thought was mine for the taking. But just like eating Oreos way too much that I can no longer eat them, failing so many times has allowed me to develop a bit of a tolerance, or even resistance to it. It’s freaking beautiful— I’m slowly learning how to manage my stress, because not worrying about failure takes an enormous weight off my shoulders.

Although personal comfortableness and a fearlessness of failure are the major changes, there’s so much more just three months of college gave me: friends who reflect the best parts of me, better decision-making skills, a vibrant hope for the future, and even a slight belly to motivate me to work out during winter break.

So, although my senior year self would view this as revolting hypocrisy, I want to let all high schoolers know that, even though I’m just the year-older version of you, I have to admit that you have a lot to learn, but in the most positive sense possible. There’s so much out there for you, and if you walk into college believing that, I guarantee you’ll have as much fun as I did, and you’ll understand what it means to truly grow into yourself.