Coming home from my first year of college left me with a lot of mixed feelings. While I'm waiting for my summer job and summer classes to start, I'm stuck in this period of uncertainty. I have free time, and I don't quite know what to do with myself. It makes me reflect on my first year of college, and while I'm excited for this summer, there are a lot of things I miss about campus and look forward to being a part of again in the fall.

1. I miss my roommate.

I really didn't think I'd be saying this last summer. Living with somebody else all the time sounded exhausting. I thought I'd spend most of my time annoyed and frustrated. Those fears were very rarely true. I miss having somebody that I could freak out to about Game Of Thrones, classes, grades, Game Of Thrones, people on campus, campus food, Game Of Thrones, rising gas prices, the limited selections of our local Walmart, did I mention Game Of Thrones?

2. I miss having unlimited high-speed internet.

This is going to sound like a petty 21st-century problem, which it is, but because I live in the country my internet at home is horrible. I'm typing this on the wifi at the church where my Dad preaches because our home internet can't handle it. We do most of our internet off of our phones through a signal booster. This week our signal booster died. Having unlimited high-speed internet is something I greatly relied on and greatly miss.

3. I miss living in the mountains.

I miss being surrounded by mountains day in and day out. I miss Sylva, my little mountain town. I wish that going for a hike was as easy as walking out of my room like it is on campus trails. I miss early morning sunrises and I miss the constant rain that comes from living in a valley.

4. I miss the food.

Don't get me wrong, one of the most exciting things is leaving campus and getting home cooked meals. I do, however, miss easy access to ice cream and crepes and other tasty campus desserts.

5. I miss my friends.

I miss having my friends around me 24/7. I miss living with the people I could complain to, laugh with, argue with, and pull pranks on.

6. I miss improvising everything.

Whether it was discovering how to cut meat with a spoon because the cafeteria was out of knives, finding out how to hang an eno beneath my bed, trying to find room on my desk for my books and my TV and my fish, or just trying to figure out how to transport 6 people in the 5 seats of my car, college teaches you how to improvise. Improvising scenarios with wiser and more cautious adults at home doesn't allow you to be quite as creative or stupid!

7. I miss being a Catamount.

Do you know how hard it is to explain to someone exactly WHAT a catamount is? I feel like I'm trying to justify the existence of a mythical creature. It's like a bobcat, but it could be like a mountain lion/cougar as well, or what some people call panthers, but our statue looks more like a bobcat, so I don't know what to tell people. What's even harder is describing what being a "catamount" is like. It's impossible to describe the community of WCU to those who have never experienced it and don't know where Cullowhee is.

8. I miss the endless search for an empty common room.

Whenever my friends and I wanted to watch a movie, somebody else did as well. The only problem was "somebody else" was multiplied times 8, and they took up every single common room in our dorm. Sometimes we went to other dorms, sometimes we watched in my room, once we brought my TV and Xbox to the printer room and set up in there. Finding an empty common room is a talent that not many have, and once you have one, somebody has to stay in it at all times before someone else comes along wanting to watch TV or cook something.

9. I miss Dollar Tree.

Don't get me wrong, we have a dollar tree where I live, but it isn't the same. I don't KNOW what items are at my local dollar tree. I don't KNOW how the aisles are set up, I don't KNOW the employees, and I don't have my friends to drag with me for a 10 minute trip that somehow lasts 2 hours. You see, trips to Dollar Tree when I lived on campus frequently turned into Dollar Tree, Taco Bell, Dollar General, and Walmart. Dollar Tree is also just a wonderful place to find strange items you never imagined you would need or want, like blue marbles for my Fish Tank, a cake carrier and cheap cake mix, cleaning towels, wildflowers, the list goes on and on!

10. I miss Google and Youtube cooking lessons.

Sometimes college students don't think things all the way through. Sometimes they buy the ingredients, set a time, gather everybody, find a common room with an empty kitchen, set everything on the counter, and realize nobody knows how to cook it. I learned how to bake a cake, fry bacon, make scrambled eggs with and without cheese, separate an egg white from a yolk, and how to slice up a pineapple and a cantaloupe mango hybrid fruit we were given at a student event. All of this happened after researching the techniques via Google and Youtube and through improvisation when we didn't have access to the fancy kitchen instruments they assumed everyone had. Now that I'm home, baking a four layer chocolate cake randomly on a Wednesday night would be met with lots of weird stares from my family who know me as the kid who read 1 1/2 minutes wrong and microwaved an eggroll for 11 1/2 minutes.

11. I miss the adventures.

I miss going on late night Walmart trips. I miss driving on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I miss doing crazy "college-kid" stuff. It's hard to go adventuring by yourself. I miss getting into trouble, like having my keys on the bottom of the lake with the cell phones locked inside the car. I miss getting out of trouble, by having an extra key set in the car we could use after getting somebody to help us pry the door open! I miss walking around campus late at night because we were bored and didn't want to be inside. I miss stumbling into random campus events and getting random free stuff like food, water bottles, hybrid fruits, etc.

I miss being a college kid with all of my college friends there to "get an education" while also having the time of our lives. I am excited about this summer and all that it will hold for me, but I am also counting down the days for my return to campus. If absence makes the heart grow fonder, I should be at maximum love-capacity in mid-August. I'm so glad that my first year went so well, and I'm so excited to go back for another one!