Imagine you’re back in kindergarten. Your mom has just dropped you off with your new backpack filled with your brand new school supplies. Your new tennis shoes squeak on the linoleum floor. You’re terrified. You don’t know anyone, not even the teachers. The new building is confusing and you’re starting to freak out. Fast forward to first grade. Your backpack is worn from the year before, but you still love it. Your crayons may be a bit broken, but they still work. You walk into the classroom that you passed every day for a year. You sit down next to your best friend and wave to your kindergarten teacher as she walks past the door. Doesn’t this picture take you back to the good ol’ days?

When you think about it, this illustration pretty much describes the feeling of college to a tee. The new places and faces are intimidating the first year, but the new stuff and the excited anticipation outweigh the fear. Just like your new backpack and fancy shoes made you feel like king of the class in kindergarten, as a freshman, you can use this new chapter in your life to show off what you have. I mean, you get to decorate a whole new room for goodness sake! I’d say that’s pretty exciting. Just like in elementary school, you’ll get a new outfit for the first day, and maybe a few more, just for luck. You’ll buy a new notebook and pen for every class, as well as color-coding your folders and organizing your desk. While the boys may not go to all that trouble, most still buy new notebooks and maybe a highlighter or two.

By the time you get to sophomore and junior year, everything is pretty much a routine. You may stock up on the 15 cent notebooks at Walmart, but there’s really no excitement of new things. The clothes will go in the closet and the blankets on the bed, but the decorations may take a few weeks to put up if they ever make it on the wall at all. A few boxes from last year will sit in your closet untouched since the beginning of summer. You’ll throw your stuff into your room and toss your textbooks haphazardly on the desk as you run out the door to greet the friends you haven’t seen in three months. This brings me to one of the horrors of freshman year: making friends.

It has been said that the friends you make freshman year of college may not be the friends you keep for the rest of your life. I have found this to be entirely true. There’s a scramble to find someone you have at least one thing in common with, even if you don’t get along very well. You’ll tolerate people just to have someone to sit with at dinner and to go with to the student functions. As the year goes on, you’ll find the courage to branch out and find more people you have things in common with, making lasting friends. When the end of the school year comes, these are the friends that you’ll promise to keep in touch with and count down the days of summer to see them again.

When you return to school the next year, you and your friends will run to each other and hug or say how much you missed each other. You’ll compare classes and promise to hang out more than you did last year. You and your friends will sit in the cafeteria, thanking your lucky stars that you have someone to sit with now, and laughing as the freshmen rush to find a place to eat. In the end, you might remember how hard it was to be a freshman, and how you wished someone had helped you back then. You may just take pity on one of these poor, unfortunate souls and guide them to becoming a pro at college. Helping one of them find a class may just brighten their day, and as you take the hand of this little kindergartener, know you may be starting them on the road to the rest of their life.