1. Our Friends
The friends you make in college are special. You suffer through finals together, help each other out when you need it the most and become each other’s makeshift family. After spending almost every day together for an entire semester, being apart leaves a huge hole in your regular routine. Every time you notice something that reminds you of a memory with your college best friend, you can’t help but turn to the person beside you and hopelessly try to explain the inside joke to no avail. It just isn’t the same; we’re all counting down the days until we can reunite with our new friends.
2. Independence
Living on your own tends to make you forget how little control you have over your own life at home. In your own apartment or dorm at college, you can sleep as late as you want (or at least nap when you want), eat whatever junk food you want when you want and leave to go wherever you want without informing anybody. Moving back under your parents’ roof not only comes with free home-cooked meals, but with all the previous obligations of high school. As nice as it is to be at home, it gets old pulling a complete turnaround from autonomy to having to go through two parents for permission to go grab coffee.
3. Your College Town
Whether you go to a huge SEC school, an urban university smackdab in the middle of a busy city or a tiny college in the middle of nowhere, the location of your school most likely played a monumental role in your choice of where to spend four or more years of your life. One of the best ways to get yourself acquainted with your college is to find your way around the town surrounding it. By the end of first semester, it’s easy to have found your favorite coffee shop or inexpensive family-owned restaurant, and it’s even easier to be sitting in your room at home craving your favorite special from the cafe across the street from your apartment.
4. Not Having To Run Into The People You Graduated With
Absolutely nothing is more awkward than running into someone who you were friends with in high school, but now you haven’t spoken since graduation. What do you talk about other than the standard “How’s school?” “Good, you?” “Good.” Or even worse: what if you run into someone who you weren’t close with in high school, and they still try to talk to you? Most people go away for college in the hopes that they’ll meet new people; once that’s accomplished, it’s hard to figure out how to act around old friends, acquaintances and frenemies. How to solve this problem? Just hide in your bedroom for as long as your mother will let you before she forces you to run errands.
5. Schoolwork
Just kidding.