You forget what it feels like to spend every second of every day doing absolutely whatever you want. It’s a dangerous power sometimes— you’re drinking at ungodly hours and eating more French fries than one might recommend, but ultimately you feel invincible. After the first week back, these are three of the things you begin to re-appreciate about life as a college student.

1. Your connection with your best friends. It’s easy to keep it up for a while— heinous Snapchats, texting all day, late night phone calls—and if you’re one of the lucky ones, doing everything together to the point that you forget that your setting has changed since it's the summer. It’s easy to keep up for a while. Eventually distance and time do what they do best, and the dynamic of relationships change a little (or a lot).

Coming back, you’re instantly reminded how much you love your friends. Everyone immediately falls back into the swing of things. You’re back to your hilariously awful antics with your partners in crime, waking up to GroupMe messages at 9:30 a.m. already inquiring about the day’s party, dancing and applying makeup and taking shots at the same time, avoiding responsibility while assembling around the tables in your school’s place to be on the most perfect day. These are the girls who fill your heart and your life with so much warmth and excitement and love that you truly cannot fathom anything bringing you down. And you’re so quickly reminded of that. Your best friend hears you’re back and comes to your room to find you PTFO at 5 p.m., so he comes back later to listen to you and your roommate babble. He forgot how ridiculous you are, but he missed it (you hope). You’re back sitting around with the guys while they play video games and drink beer. You bask in how absurd they are and how much you love them. You’re fixing things that you shouldn’t have let break and rediscovering the light that people have to offer. There is no better feeling.

2. Dorm life. Living in a dorm is often so underrated. Is it the Ritz Carlton? No. Typically it’s pretty prison-esque before you infiltrate. The nicer housing resembles a hospital. Boys are using their desks as beer pong tables. But, let's be realistic-- Do you really deserve a luxury living situation? Living in a dorm is everything. I never want to give it up. You can make your room nice and homey on your own terms with your own decorations. You are living with your best friends. It is a never-ending sleepover. Your friend realizes your room is colder than his, and he decides to join. Everyone in your suite is in class? You walk next door to find more of your best friends watching Netflix and recapping the prior night's events. The guys and the girls go door-to-door helping each other out with mixer theme items. Anyone you want to see is a stairwell away, and you visit them uninvited whenever you want with little to no warning.

Dorm life: you’re provided with laundry machines that are totally free to operate, you’re a 15 minute walk tops from anywhere you could want to be on campus, and !!!everything is in the palm of your hand!!! Your phone charger reaches your bed and desk, there are more plugs in more places than you could dream of putting use to, the fridge and microwave are always within a five step radius. Need a bag of goldfish? Dorm life!! You can reach them from your bed!! Everything and everyone is so close to you; you couldn’t ask for more. (Except maybe a drastic Wi-Fi improvement...)

3. Having a life. Summer is begged for once you hit a wall at the end of second semester. If you have to do one more class assignment, you will have a full-blown mental breakdown. If you take one more sip of alcohol, there is a 10 out of 10 chance that you will throw up. If you step foot in another frat basement, you’ll honestly probably just fall asleep in it. If you spend one more penny, you’ll literally be in debt. You need summer to do absolutely nothing and recover from the toll that college took. But quickly, you miss that toll. And you stop thinking of it as a toll, and start missing it as your life. You get back to school and you realize how much you missed the phenomenon of forgetting what it feels like to catch your breath. You wake up and make your bed (because you’d never want a dorm room that wasn’t aesthetically pleasing), you get ready to look like a person, you go to class and get food with your friends and spend time in the lib and sit around outside, and you relish in the fact that you haven’t seen your bed in 12 hours. You have a life here.

I’m not one for clichés, but now is the time to make every second count. And being in college reminds you of that. There is so much to do. I will honestly never understand the college obsession with Netflix (not that I don’t appreciate and live for a good binge night when I need downtime) because college has everything to offer. You have a purpose here--a million purposes--that far transcend walking the dog at home. You have a class to think for and a setting to look good for and plans to wake up to. You’re out and about all day accomplishing what you need to accomplish (hopefully) and you reward yourself at the end of the day (but sometimes in the middle of the day) with a drink and some time with your best friends. And after going three months without it, I’d never wish college away again.