As a freshman, I wore my ID badge around my neck proudly, and I still do. Although I wear the badge around my neck for convenience, it also carries symbolism. I am a part of something bigger than myself: a college student a Marshall University. I grab an iced coffee and banana nut bread at Starbucks, hang out with my friends and walk across the street from my dorm room to the Campus Christian Center, where I attend BCM on Wednesday nights. Huntington has become my home-away-from-home, and I'm different now than I was four years ago.

My parents have always been there: behind the lens of a camera at Social Studies fairs and kung-fu tournaments, helping me with homework from kindergarten to my senior year of high school, and now in college. I may live two hours away from my parents and grandparents for the majority of the year, but they are still there--a phone call away to just talk or calm me down in the middle of a crisis. In the uncertainty of adulthood, it sometimes feels like I need them now more than ever. I can never thank them enough for their selfless moral and financial support over the years. I love you all more than life itself. Freshmen, call your parents and/ or grandparents and keep them Involved in your lives. If you are leaving home for the first time, college is also a difficult transition for them. Let them love you.

From a frazzled freshman with no sense of literal, not metaphorical, direction, I became adept at finding my way around campus. I found the fastest way to Corbly Hall, which is home to my beloved English Department. You know you're a senior when you feel like you don't need supplemental oxygen on the uphill Mount Everest-like climb that is the Corbly Hall staircases. My mother kept telling me I'd find life-long friends in college, and she is right. The three friends I made in my first English course: Hallie, Chase, and Tayler are still some of my best friends and through thick and thin, we've stuck together. Movie nights with the occasional milkshake or microwaveable burrito with them will forever be ingrained into my brain as my favorite memory of college. They were my first lab partners, too. I love them and they have made my undergraduate time worth all the tears and all-nighters. To my friends I met in Corbly Hall, I love you all and I couldn't have made it to my senior year without you. In addition, my best friends since childhood, Kayla Goodwin and Lydia Lake, and I have grown up together--from freezing our tails off standing outside of Hamilton Junior High in the winter, to evenings eating nachos at Black Sheep, watching movies at their apartment, or going to church together on Sundays. There are moments when we drift apart from the chaos of our lives, but we always wind up together again, and pick back up where we left off. I love you both. My advice to freshmen is to find friends who make you laugh and challenge you to be a better person. These friendships are not constructed from any superficiality, but on the desire to live life together and support one another.

I've also had special, kind, and intelligent English professors that have goaded me on to my senior year. My creative writing professors, Dr. Rachael Peckham and Professor Daniel O'Malley, taught me that revision is not just editing, but "re-seeing" the whole project. Not one piece of writing is ever "finished" or permanent. Every essay, every short story can stand to be examined from a different perspective. I appreciate their tireless effort in helping me hone my craft by helping me find and own my voice. My literature professors and theory professors: Dr. Jane Hill, Professor Anna Rollins, Dr. Hillary Brewster, Dr. David Hatfield, Dr. Kateryna Schray, and Dr. Daniel Lewis, have all helped me see the potential in my work and helped me become a budding professional in the English Field. Every single one of these professors is always willing to help me: to listen if I have a problem or help me with an assignment or a writing project. I am so fortunate to know and learn under these people, their kindness has been invaluable to me as a student. Make a home in your Department.  Make an effort to know your professors and choose classes that will broaden the horizons of your brain, not just because those classes are "easy," at a convenient time, or taught by a nice professor. You'll never grow as a person that way. The biggest lesson I've learned in college is that if an opportunity arises, always say yes! There's a scholarship application that you should fill out? Yes, you should! A class that you want to take is at 8AM? Take it. Say yes!

I don't what the future holds for me, but I'm excited. It's going to be a chaotic, fun last year of undergrad. I love being a part of The Herd and I wouldn't have to any other way.