With less than three weeks left before I go home for the summer, it’s strange to look back on my first year at college and think that it’s almost over. A year ago I was exactly in the position you are now, just committed to Vanderbilt University, still without a clue of whether that’s where you are meant to be going, let alone trying to grasp the fact that you’re about to graduate high school. After about a million goodbye hugs and grad parties consisting of a daily diet of white cake, cold pasta, and lemonade (and our parents not having to feed us for a good couple of weeks), you’ll finally know you’re ready to move on, not for lack of many summer hangouts and nostalgic plane letters.
Move in day comes faster than expected, and before you know it you’re awkwardly whisked away in a golf cart with a trunk load of suitcases, the first of the freshmen to be moved into your dorm house by accident to the confused but eager cheers of enthusiastic upperclassmen. Mortified by the amount of small talk you’ll have to do, hands to shake, and number of times you introduce yourself, you’ll veer from conversation to conversation and face to face too overwhelmed to remember anything. Then comes Founder’s Walk, one of those cool traditions inaugurating the freshmen class, where you supposedly bump into some of your soon to be closest friends (not to say this didn’t happen to some of my closest friends now) and know is supposed to be mean a lot, but doesn’t actually become meaningful until you are on the other side of it and can look back on it. Surprisingly, you’ll find your favorite part of the evening is finding the two other freshmen from your high school class on the way back and getting dinner with the familiar faces you are going to try so hard to get away from. First lesson of college: You’re going to miss home so much more than you could imagine.
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As the warm weather sticks around far longer than you expect, the rest of first semester will become a whirlwind of memories. Signing up for email listserves of at least twenty clubs you won’t actually join, surprising your roomie with balloons on her bed for her birthday (it’ll be hard trying to cover all the birthdays this year, but it won’t be for lack of you trying), appreciating the inner warmth of your first visit home and falling back into place with old friends, experiencing your first Halloweekend in the frattiest way possible (yes it is just like the movies), finally turning nineteen and becoming a certifiable adult according to the state of Nebraska, but realizing you still have no idea “how to adult” in any capacity possible, and barely escaping the wrath of finals before winter vacation.
You’ll think second semester can’t be any crazier than the first (there's only been like two days with snow and one of them got called a snow day!), but when spring rolls around you’ll be proved wrong time and time again. This semester it’ll be more about growth though. You thought you did a lot of growing your senior year of high school, just wait till 2016 hits you smack in the face. But for every time you fall, rest assured you will eventually get back up, and for the better, as cliché as it sounds (they are clichés for a reason!). You’ll learn what it means to put your beliefs into action and truly be open to new experiences and viewpoints other than your own. You’ll realize there are new qualities you want to strive for such as being able to articulate your thoughts into words to form better and more coherent and substantiated arguments on the spot while still being respectful (and if that isn’t a mouthful, I don’t know what is). You’ll also realize you can succeed in different ways than from high school and go after newly found passions that lead to great accomplishments. Lastly, and definitely most important, you’ll reach out to so many new, cool and totally different people and be impacted by every single one of them in some way. You’ll end up forging real, raw relationships with friends who live close to your home on campus in Gillette house and become close to your heart, whether that’s through letting them see you cry, getting dinner on the daily, supporting them through tough times, or playing hot seat far past a reasonable time for a human to go to sleep.
So for the sake of my previous lack of brevity, I’ll just tell it to you straight now. It won’t be fun the night before move-in day when you cry in your parent’s hotel room wondering if you’re really ready to start over 14 hours away from home. The question isn’t if you’re ready though, because coming into the fall with no idea whatsoever of what you want out of your freshmen year, you’ll somehow find all of your expectations fulfilled better than you ever thought possible. Last lesson of freshmen year of college: You’re going to miss home so much more than you could imagine, but it’ll be so worth it because now you’ll have more than one place to call home.
Love,
Your future self
