Recently I paid a visit to my freshman year dorm, Stoke, affectionately known as Stoke Palace. I visited my old room and started a conversation with the freshman girls that are currently living there. As a first semester sophomore, it’s not too hard to remember what it felt like to be a freshman trying to navigate college life for the first time. However, as I talked to them, I felt much older than their eighteen years. Memories of freshman year felt far away, but easily within reach - all at the same time, as if a part of me was still there, living in my double on the third floor of Stoke.

During the months leading up to my freshman year, I was constantly being reminded of the “freshman experience.” Whether it was choosing a dorm or deciding to continue a relationship long distance, everyone I talked to stressed the importance of the “freshman experience” and how certain choices I made would cause me to miss out on it. Fast forward to the first semester of my freshman year and it seemed as if everyone expected my world to revolve around going out, getting drunk and meeting people. But for me, it didn’t.

There are a lot of expectations that surround your freshman year of college, starting as early as orientation. However, most of these don’t actually live up to the hype. For example:

• Expectation: You will meet your best friends at freshman orientation.
• Reality: You will get a bunch of people’s numbers and plan on hanging out when school starts, but you won’t actually ever see them again.
• Expectation: You will go to a banger on the first night of college.
• Reality: You will either a.) walk around for hours aimlessly looking for a party that will let random freshman in or b.) stay in and watch Netflix.
• Expectation: You and your freshman year roommate(s) will be instant best friends and will room together for the next four years.
• Reality: I’m sorry, but no. This rarely happens.

As a quiet small town girl with a boyfriend back home, I wasn’t exactly interested in going out every night. Additionally, I just wasn’t sure that UNH was 100% the place for me, a thought that made me feel like somehow I was abnormal. As I looked around at the people on campus, as well as at the pictures my high school friends were constantly posting on Facebook, everyone seemed to be having a blast with their brand new friends at the school of their dreams. But, I wasn’t. I spent most nights face-timing my then-boyfriend and wishing more than anything that I was at home with my dogs and my little brother. I liked my roommate and had met a few people, but I still just didn’t feel at home and the thought that I was missing out on this so-called, “freshman experience” was killing me.

But one day, it all changed. I met the three girls who were living in the room next door to mine. They were all from Rhode Island and as we got to talking, I realized that they too didn’t feel like freshman year was living up to their expectations. Over the course of the year we became best friends, bonding over our homesickness and often making rash decisions to transfer to Florida (that might have had a little to do with the ridiculously cold winter we had... walking to HoCo in negative twenty five degree wind chill is enough to make even the most enthusiastic Wildcat wish they had gone to Florida State University). The best part is that as I’m writing this, I’m sitting with two of them in our awesome suite in the Mills, ecstatic about being back at our favorite place in the 603.

As I talked to the girl that lived in my old room, giving her tips for navigating the ropes, she said something that hit me pretty hard. “Thank you for being so honest.” In that moment it dawned on me that that’s probably what I needed when I was a freshman feeling so lost and scared: someone to just be honest with me. So much of freshman year seems to consist of faking it, pushing away the feelings of homesickness and pretending that partying four times a week is something you really want to do, tuning out the butterflies in your stomach and pretending that the girls you’re kind of close with can replace your high school best friends. I just needed someone like myself to grab my shoulders and say, “Stop worrying. You don’t have to have it all right the first time.”

So what, in my opinion, is the real freshman experience? The freshman experience is what you make of it. If you want to go out and party all of the time? Go for it. If you’d rather stay in and study or watch a whole season of a show on Netflix? Do it. It doesn’t matter how you choose to live out your freshman year, as long as you’re happy.

So to all of the freshman out there, living it up or wishing they were at home, take advantage of this blank slate. Become more independent, learn, work hard, join clubs, make friends and most importantly make memories on your own account, not for the approval of others. Freshman year goes by in the blink of an eye and before you know it you’ll be saying goodbye to your friends and heading home for the summer, already looking forward to coming back in the fall and doing it all over again.