We often hear people speak of the “college experience.” Usually, this phrase is used in reference to drinking, partying, and living on your own for the first time in your life. It is a phrase that attempts to encompass everything that a typical college student should be going through. But the lifestyle that the “college experience” portrays actually doesn’t correctly represent all collegiate students in America today.

I, for example, am living a very different college experience than that phrase lets on. As a commuter, the late night talking with your roommate, hiding bottles from your RA, bonding with your floor and using FaceTime with your parents, are all lost on me. There are pros and cons to every living situation, especially when in college, but I am simply emphasizing the fact that everyone’s experience varies significantly. Whether the food you’re eating is from the dining hall, Domino's Pizza in your apartment or your mom’s cooked meal at home, the only thing that’s constant is that college is the time to find yourself and thrive in a new environment.

When most people think of college, they imagine the dorms, Greek life, hook up culture and auditorium classes filled with students that movies tend to portray. A commuter student that gets excited when she’s guest-swiped into the dining hall doesn’t tend to come to mind. Fortunately, I have had the opportunity to visit friends in other situations at other universities. I have experienced my commuter lifestyle, and have also had the chance to spend a weekend with a friend residing in an apartment right off-campus, and with another friend that lives in the dorms at her campus.

And because I have witnessed these varying living situations, I can attest that they are significantly different lifestyles. There is so much that is affected by where you live while in college — where you study, eat, go to the bathroom, who you hang out with and how you manage your time. Whereas someone living in the dorms needs to account for their 10-minute walk back to their room when planning their daily schedule, I need to consider my 30-minute drive back home when planning mine. Again, there are pros and cons to every situation, but it is inevitably true that the differences in the lifestyles are immense.

However, in seeing my friends at their universities in their alternative living situations, I have concluded that the “college experience” is absolutely not what the movies tend to demonstrate. The college experience is the bittersweet combination of managing hard work (because you know that the grades and activities that you achieve in college are what set you up to reach your future goals and dreams) and care-free fun (because you’re old enough to do more while subconsciously knowing that after these four years in college, it will not be socially acceptable to go clubbing and bar hopping every weekend).

So college generally gives us four years — years that are deemed to be the most important in our lives for our futures, while also being the last couple of years when we can have somewhat reckless abandon. Seems pretty unfair. Despite the injustice in the entire concept of college life, all collegiate students everywhere can bond over the shared struggle in balancing these equally important sectors of their lives.

So good luck to all of you (and to me) in figuring out how to be a responsible student and a total turn-up simultaneously for the next couple of years.