I remember my first day of classes, and my first class was a 9:25 computer literacy class. I walked into the digitorium and saw so many different and new faces. Needless to say, I was a little scared of what was going to come in college. All I heard was about how much harder college is and how stressful it is. It feels like yesterday that I walked into that first session, and I have learned a lot about college.

First of all, let me start off by saying that college is definitely not easy. It is very stressful at times (especially around finals and midterms) and it will consist of a lot of late nights working on speeches or papers or studying for a big test. Also, college is very expensive. You will take out a student loan and spend hundreds of dollars on books every semester. But, truly, those are the only negative things that I have to say about college.

I learned this first year just how much different college is from high school. They are polar opposites. As a college student, you have so much more freedom. You can literally do whatever you want and you have no one there to tell you what to do. But with that freedom comes a lot of responsibility. No one is holding your hand anymore and that can be misunderstood. That responsibility will either be a great thing or a horrible thing for you.

What I also learned is that coming into college, you will have to start with a clean slate. You will have to learn how to create new friendships with people now that you are not with the same people from high school. This is something that I was definitely nervous about, but it is a part of growing up and being a college student. Yeah, it sucks that you have to make new friends, but I believe making friends in college is really important.

The last thing that really hit me this year is that I really want these next three years to go by slowly. Rarely do you hear someone say that they want school to go by slowly, but I’m definitely one of the few. These are the times that you talk about to your kids when you get older and to your buddies when you are playing golf on a Saturday morning. No one likes doing homework and taking extremely hard tests, but I know that these are truly going to be the three easiest years of my life and that I’m going to look back and wish I could go back and experience everything again. These are times that I don’t want to wish away and hope they go by slowly (even though they wont).

My first year of college came with a whole lot of change: making new friends, becoming more responsible and figuring out what I really wanted to do for the rest of my life. But with that change, I learned a whole lot about the true college experience. With three more years to go until I enter the real world, I will definitely enjoy these last years and reminisce about that nervous but fascinating freshmen year.