Excited to go back to college? Join the club. With about a month left of summer, students everywhere are itching to get back to school and with good reason. The difference between life in your hometown and life at college is like night and day.

Don’t get me wrong, being home for a little while was great. As it turns out, parents are really cool people with lives outsides of their children, and are super fun to hang out with! Shocking, I know. Also, free food, free housing, and getting to see old friends are all great things. However, it does get old after a while.

Besides that, if you’re living under your parents’ roof, odds are you’re also living under their rules, no matter how cool they are. Suddenly you have a midnight curfew. Wait, what? All you can do is laugh and think to yourself that when you’re at college, your night STARTS at midnight, not ends. You’re so used to having tons of freedom that you feel suffocated at even the mention of a few rules. (Still love you, Mom and Dad.)

And when you finally do get a little freedom to spend time with friends, you realize that you’re kind of sick of them. Maybe you changed, maybe they changed, or maybe both? All you know is that you can only have so many conversations about “that one time at homecoming” or “the 2012 football section semi-final game you almost won.”

That leads to missing your college friends, but who could blame you? They’re smart and funny and interesting and trustworthy and let you borrow their biology study guides. You count down the days until everyone is reunited. (It's 30 days, in case you were wondering.) The daydreams about the local coffee shops and late night pizza ordering studying get more and more frequent.

Then, you realize that you actually miss going to class, studying, and learning. Yes, you read that correctly. One of the best parts about college is that you get the chance to find a subject you’re passionate about and try to make a future out of it. While you’re sitting at your boring internship or minimum wage summer job, you catch yourself missing the endless research, tests and quizzes everyone fails, and professors with unidentifiable accents.

To all of you students out there craving college, your wait is almost over. Just keep texting/calling/FaceTiming/emailing/faxing your college friends, and you’ll make it through, I promise. You can survive the rest of the summer, and try to make the most of it! Go to the beach, eat your weight in ice cream, and earn as much money as possible because college is really f*cking expensive.