So, you’re a freshman, a sophomore, a junior, a fifth year… who cares?

You’re not supposed to know what to do.

You’re not supposed to know who you are.

Like most, I came into college with one mindset: Change.

I was from a small town where we found out majority of the gossip from listening to the moms talk at the football games. Everyone knew everyone. Your secret wasn’t really a secret. Someone went down the wrong path? Pregnant? Failed out? We all knew. We knew before you even told us it happened.

There were so many untold expectations for all of us. We needed to be that girl who went on to an Ivy League, that boy who went D1, we just needed to be that person who made a name for themselves.

It’s hard. You grow up in a sheltered world without even knowing it. You go to school with majority of the same people for over seven years and know every face passing by. You know where you are, what is surrounding you, and who you want to talk to. Then suddenly, its gone. You’re at a new shelter. You look around and do not know a single person. You walk down the street and do not know where you are. You are not familiar with the culture and you simply feel lost.

It’s your first day of classes.

You look around, and think to yourself now what?

You go back to your dorm, take a running jump onto your lofted bed and call your dad crying. You don’t understand how everybody is already friends? How do people even know what they are doing? You don’t understand how college is supposed to be the “best years of your life” and you’re sitting in your dorm during your first week ready to move back home. He tells you to wait it out. You listen.

Fast forward one year and you’re finally all adjusted. Remember that time you didn’t know a soul? Yeah that’s in the past. You know everyone now. You’ve made a few friends, lost a few, and you have finally found friendships that you can actually rely on.

You have a core group of friends and you suddenly feel happy. You never want to come home-- you love it here. Everything they said to you is true—college really is the time of your life.

But then, you find that there are the days where you don’t feel happy.

You struggle.

You fail a test. You get dumped. You’re anxious. You’re sad.

You don’t know what you’re doing.

You can’t figure out who you are.

You’re in a new environment filled with new people for over a year and you still can’t figure out who you are. And it’s okay. Because that’s what college is for.

College is meant for struggle. It’s meant for you to come in, knowing not a single soul, and for you to slowly within your struggles…figure yourself out. To me, the best part about college is change. This sense of change is much different than that of your hometown exams, middle school relationships, or problems you once knew.

College change is meant to scare you, intimidate you, freak you out… but mostly, college change is to better you.

Those times when you are sitting in the library past 1:00am are to teach you resilience. Those three weeks of not knowing a single person in your residence hall is to teach you patience. Those anatomy exams you did poorly on are to teach you that sometimes, you are allowed to fail.

Life past your sheltered- home town days is good. You just need to open your mind to change.