I could give some spiel about how starting your freshman year of college is a time of growth and excitement as you plummet into the new, unknown, and overwhelming void that is also known as your undergraduate career, but I’m not. While this description is relatively accurate, college isn’t necessarily all new experiences.

Whether you’ve lived with a roommate before, spent a night or two sampling the party circuit, learned the art of how to enhance ramen, or simply taken on a new environment with confidence and ease, this time, doesn’t have to be a complete three-sixty from your high school days. While it typically involves new places, people, views, and experiences, there are more constants than you think from the first eighteen years of your life to the beginning of the rest of your life, also known as freshman year.

For many, proximity to home is a major factor that goes into where they decide to receive their bachelor’s degree. Usually, this has to do with comfort, ease of weekend visits, and of course the innate desires to be around family and loved ones. Personally, this was a major contributor towards my decision of where to go, but it had many benefits outside of taking a break from the dining hall a few weekends out of the semester for a home-cooked meal. Like myself, many of my close friends from high school also chose to attend school relatively close to home, and this has served as a source of homegrown comfort, happiness, and familiarity in my short time at college thus far.

If you had a dollar for every new person you met in your first month of freshman year, you would probably have enough money to Uber to every one of your classes for the whole first semester. This is a fun time and gives you an idea of who your peers are, but after a while the faces blend together, names slip your mind, and it becomes hard to find your niche. However, when you tackle this new environment with some of the most fun, trustworthy people you know by your side, it becomes less overwhelming and you find yourself amidst a perfect blend of the new and the old.

Coming to college with your best friends doesn’t keep you from meeting new people, nor does it give you some significant advantage over your classmates that may not know anyone at first. For me, having my best friends that I’ve known for many years living on the same street, at the same school, and even in some of my classes with me has allowed me to form a closer relationship with them and grow together as people. Of course, they serve as a great resource for someone to always go to the dining hall with, sleeping over if your dorm is unavailable, carpooling home with, going out on the weekend, staying in for a movie night, and reluctantly complete homework with. However, they also are a jumping off point for meeting more people, trying new things, and making the most of college while still staying close to one another. With my best friends by my side, I’ve never felt more open to what life has to offer for me because I’m experiencing a time of great change, confusion, and uncertainty with some of my favorite people by my side.

When people give advice for college, they usually say to always get a decent amount of sleep, never miss your classes, always take advantage of office hours, and try to avoid the freshman fifteen. However, my advice is to either go to college with your best friends or make some when you get there because time spent away in a cramped dorm is monumentally better when the people you surround yourself with feel like home.