When a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed college freshman gets ready to fly the nest they are all given an extraordinarily unnecessary, but yet oddly endearing, the amount of advice from the people around them. This advice ranges anywhere from "NEVER go anywhere alone" to "It does not matter how much of a morning person you think are, 8 a.m.'s WILL be the death of you."

While this advice seemed fairly easy to understand, (lets be honest- most of us were too busy envisioning our dorms and breathing in the beginning scent of freedom to even fully acknowledge the advice in the first place) no amount of advice could ever prepare us for the year ahead.

Freshman year is full of tests. Not the kind you fill out on Scranton with a #2 pencil, but the kind that makes you question all the parts of yourself you had been so sure of in the Fall. There are a lot of ups and a plenty of downs. You are pushed to what you think is your limit, and then you overcome. You learn SO much. In fact, it's during those late nights in the computer lab with you best friend- fueled on a 3-hour power nap, Mountain Dew and anything left in the vending machine- that you take away some of the best lessons and memories that you will ever make. In those short 9 months, you will learn more about yourself than you had in the last 19 years. Everybody always warns you about the first year of college, but that's the easy part.

Maybe it's because we are so caught up in our new lives that we forget life goes on without us. Those trying but exciting 9 months pass by, and then the real challenge starts- we go home. In some ways, nothing has changed, but in every way we have. We come home thinking we can hit the "play" button and suddenly life at home will fall from the frozen dream-land we left it in when we went to college and nothing would be different- but that's not how it works.

We come home and our little sister that we left upstairs in her room playing with barbies has become this tall, beautiful young woman with a cell phone and an eye for our clothing; while the other one we thought we left in front of a DVD of Frozen, drinking out of a sippy cup is now making her own sandwiches for lunch and holding intelligent conversations about life. Walls have been painted, pictures hung, and furniture moved. And there you stand, in the middle of it all, quite confused how you missed it.

It's then that it hits you, the reality of your life, from this point forward life will consist of packing, unpacking, and repacking your things until you settle in a place of your own.You realize you will undoubtedly always be missing something- whether you are at school and missing home or at home and missing school. Your high school friends, the ones you made a decade of memories with have changed too. They have friends with strange names and inside jokes you are not a part of. Most of them have changed more drastically than you thought. Some you may find you can no longer relate to at all, but if you're lucky, a few of them changed just as you did and being with them will be like going back in time to when life at home didn't feel like a foreign planet.

Going back home is the hardest part of that first year. That's the truth about going home.