For most adults -- at least, the adults I know -- college is defined not by the classes they took or the majors they declared, but by the friends they met there. My mother's closest friends are still the friends she made at Haverford in the '80s, and I grew up with them and their children.

When I showed up at college in August, pale and cotton-mouthed with nerves, most of my anxiety had nothing to do with new classes or finding my way around the campus (although I am completely geographically inept) -- I was most worried about finding people I liked and who, miraculously, would like me.

I don't remember feeling alone for even an hour during the first week, and after that first few days of orientation, the group of us who'd become friends during the week just stayed friends. We settled into a routine, a new way of living, and all the newness and anxieties of college were somehow less when we were around each other.

Crowded dining halls are a lot less scary when you have someone waiting for you inside. I hate walking into busy places on my own, and there was always someone to walk with me. We made a group iMessage and named it Sneeze Chart after our amateur science experiment to track our own sneezes (I didn't sneeze once for the first four weeks of college, and I know it for sure because it's tracked on the sneeze chart).

Leaving for our winter break in December was a little bit horrible. By then I was dying to be at home - I was tired and stressed and burned out from three and a half months of working too much and sleeping too little. But leaving my friends was wrenching; it was like leaving my family.

On the night before most of us left, we talked about the length of the break (six weeks without each other!) and one of my good friends said something lovely: "Our families aren't here all the time, so we end up making our own family. You're basically my family now."

That's how I feel now, one week before we all leave campus for the summer - three hot months apart, three months to sleep and suntan and rejuvenate before classes start again in the fall. Classes, of course, are an important and unforgettable part of being in college.

But I don't necessarily think of it just as classes starting again; it's a whole life taking up where it left off, people and events and places to see and things to talk about.

My friends have made my first year of college more memorable than any of the essays I wrote or the tests I grudgingly sat through. I've learned many amazing and wonderful things, and I understand how important they are, but in the end, it's the people I met who will end up influencing my life the most.

To all my friends here: thank you for being funny and understanding and clumsy and gracious and willing and stubborn and kind. Thank you for making me laugh so hard I could barely stand and running through the rain to make it to class and stumbling up all four flights of steps to a friend's room and curling up in library study rooms to watch movies.

Thanks for being with me, with all of us, through rain and sun and bone-crunching embarrassment and heart-swelling joy. I couldn't have dreamed of better friends or better people -- I can't imagine being without you.