College is an exciting time: full of new people, experiences, ways of thinking, and decisions. With the world around you changing so fast, it can be hard to get your footing. Being away from the life you have been living for the past eighteen years can leave anyone feeling confused or at least introspective.

The college experience is about nothing if not about personal growth. You have been fully immersed into a brand new word that is overwhelming and exciting. An interesting part of college is that many of the high school norms have gone away. It is now more important to be your own person, stand out for the best reasons, and try as hard as you can to reach your fullest potential. Your future sits right in front of you, and you are forced to look yourself in the eye and ask some difficult yet crucial questions.

Who am I? What is most important to me? How do I want others to view me? How do I want to view myself? What would I be willing to devote my life to?

If you take on these questions with a hopeful, optimistic view, these questions are rewarding, and in college, you are at the greatest advantage to decide how you want to answers these questions. If you don't feel like your behaviors match your answers, you can either live with the discomfort of inconsistency or change to become who you want to be.

Leo Tolstoy, one of my personal favorite authors (yes, I'm one of those people), once stated, "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."

The key to making the world a better place, which I would argue most people want to do within their lifetimes, begins with changing yourself.

By no means is this easy, but it is rewarding. Becoming who you always wanted to be or trying to reach the stars is a process. You one day may face yourself in the mirror and find that you have changed, but it's up to you to make those changes ones you want to see. College is a transformative experience that I don't think anyone can come out of without being changed a little. College is about the experiences you have: ones of success and defeat, ones of peace and discomfort. College is an academic, social, and individual experience where you are actively pursuing to further gain more knowledge and to become a more informed individual.

What you do with this newfound knowledge is up to you, but if you are unhappy with how life is going, you can change your career path, habits, and attitudes. You are in control of the experiences you can have, how involved you are in your world around you, and how many opportunities you take. It is hard work, but actively pursuing change can help to make you a better person and the world a better place too.

When you head back home, you may find that you have outgrown the old model for how you defined yourself or how others defined you. You may not be the same person as when you left. A new version with new priorities, ideas, and goals may emerge or be on the horizon, and that's okay. When you were younger, you grew out of your shoes and traded them for a bigger size that fit you better. Trading in an outdated, limited version of yourself for a better one may take some time getting used to, but it will be much more comfortable in the future.

It's okay to be the person that changed in college; in fact, expect to change.