To my sister:

I thought to extend to you some tips and tricks that I wish I had known before I entered college or things I learned during my first year that will be helpful in life regardless.

Dorm:

• Never underestimate a quality mattress pad
• Buying a long iPhone charger is worth it
• Some nights the memories made are worth the sleepy next-days, just not all the time. Ration accordingly
• Stock up on quarters. Literally hoard them

Social:

• Everyone around you is a future LinkedIn contact***
• Be the grown-up. Say hello in the day to the people you spent time with at night. You can only have a good friend from there on out. Or unless you* wanted it to be an in-out scenario
• The whole “the older (wo)men get, the more mature they become” graph doesn’t always correlate in an upward direction
• “Phones down. Eyes up.”
• Swallowing your pride doesn’t mean you lost
• You only know if you don’t like something if you try it first
• Have a movie night, a wine night, a walk-around-campus-and-get-into-buildings night
• Be friends with those who ask you questions after they ask you how you are

Life:

• “Trust the timing of your life.”
• Do the things you want to do while you have the body and the opportunity to do them
• It’s not always “the best four years,” and sometimes the best years are after those four. It’s all just part of life and you’ve got a long time
• Don’t let “the good times” pass you by without recognizing them
• “A woman should never invest in a relationship she wouldn’t want for her daughter, nor allow any man to treat her in a way she would scold her son for.”
• “You are allowed to feel exactly how you feel.”
• People don’t judge nearly as much as we believe them to
• Conquer “L’esprit de l’escalier.” This phrase is a French phrase, and it refers to that moment when you are walking away, whether from an argument or a flirtation or just that-type-of moment, and you think of the perfect thing to have said just forty clock-ticks ago. Speak your mind as you think, and I guarantee that you will have been glad to have not only thunk it, but expressed it as well. And I’m sure the other person will appreciate it as well

Education:

• Majors come and go, but a GPA stays forever
• That having been said, a degree means more than a GPA; don’t miss out on life because you’re stressing about a test. In the long run, a test is just a test, but a life is yours and it only happens once; don’t “regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”
• Sign up for the clubs, even if you immediately delete the weekly emails from your inbox. It’s an outlet and you can take it or leave it as you please
• You can drop classes. Dropping is better than failing. Like I said, a GPA is forever
• Colleges.niche.com is surprisingly accurate
• Invest in a good watch and black heels and treat them well; impressions for internships/jobs are important
• Always use ratemyprofessor.com before choosing your class schedule
• Following up on that, choose your classes ahead of time. Better to stress about your choices than to stress about your shitty class
• Show up to class, take notes, and look at your professor. Don’t look at your phone in class. It’s only 45 minutes. And it’s not worth your professors hating you
• Sometimes office hours are pointless. Try it once, but if it doesn’t work, don’t go back
• Take a stressful week one day at a time
• The core curriculum is where you pick up small facts or even a new major. Or just party conversations. Pay attention and you’ll have little tidbits to spit here and there
• Work hard. Take pride in the time you spend sitting down and working on your future. Even if others act like they aren’t working or that classes are the last things on their to-do lists, everyone is secretly working his or her asses off. And if they’re not, well, you’re just one step ahead of the game
• This is one of those times in your life that you will be surrounded by similarities. This is also one of the last times in your life that this will happen. You are here, there, with others all around your same age, all working toward a common goal. Embrace that comradery. Shout through a bullhorn at a game, sit on someone’s shoulders at a concert, take that one last drink before calling it a night, ravage your brain over that one certain word to get that one sentence just perfect. But whatever you do, don’t just stay. Stay out or stay in or stay up. Take full advantage of this, that community

Something I came up with after my first year of college is that the good times are for gratitude and the bad times are for perspective. I wish you all the more the former rather than the latter, however, the latter will come and it will come as it does to every person respectively with a shocking ferocity. But remember that you are surrounded by people that are similar and you can always find comfort in similarity, and phones can make a phone call to whomever you wish at whatever hour. Don't forget to take advantage of that 10-digit-away support system.

Two last things for you: 1) "Do it to do it, not to have done it." 2) It’s never a bad time to drink water, kiddo.