It feels like just last week we were picking our roommates, buying anything and everything UW-Madison, and praying that we would be able to survive on our own without our parents for the first time. As we approach the dreaded final exam season, I feel that it’s important to note just how far we’ve come in such a short amount of time. We went from the scared, lanyard-obsessed freshmen who had no idea what we were doing into the confident, more adjusted almost-sophomores who are about 80 percent Starbucks coffee and 20 percent Ian’s pizza.

As we’ve become more accustomed to the college lifestyle, we’ve learned that ordering Insomnia Cookies at 2 a.m. at College Library is totally normal and that Ian’s is the place to be after a fun night out on the town. We’ve also discovered that there’s almost always a party happening- whether it be at an apartment, a dorm room, a fraternity house, or even a bar- and who you know can be the difference between getting in or trying the next house down the street. But our time as freshmen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has boiled down to more than just drinking and junk food, we’ve learned important lessons and made lifelong friends that will stay with us for years to come.

As freshmen with basically no idea how to do college the “right” way. Most of us undoubtedly wondered around aimlessly, probably looking like chickens with their heads cut off, the moment our parents drove away. We had just been given all the freedom we never had and we basically could do anything we want. Stay up all night binge-watching Netflix? Check. Skip class because you stayed out too late the night before? Check. But as we learned that some classes do in fact take attendance and roommates get annoyed if you sleep all day, we began to adjust to what it really means to live on our own. This meant actually learning how to do our own laundry, cleaning up after ourselves, and making grocery lists so we didn’t starve to death once Gordon closed. We also learned that high school studying and college studying are two completely different things and that if you happen to be at College until at six in the morning cramming for an exam it’s totally normal and odds are you aren’t alone. Further, we learned that college is basically just sitting on your laptop at different locations across campus trying to convince yourself that you’ll actually start your homework after this one YouTube video and probably failing to do just that.

Mainly, we’ve come such a long way in the past nine months and grown as individuals. We’ve managed to keep ourselves alive and not fail out of school along the way. But as we end this last semester of our freshmen year, it is important to push through and endure these last few weeks of finals and its essential that we appreciate these last moments we have with our friends before we all go our separate ways for summer break. We’ve worked so hard all year just to get to this point and we’re almost to that finish line, so keep up the hard work Badgers and On Wisconsin!