Congratulations! If you're reading this, it means that quite recently you graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and are a new alumni. What else does that mean? It means you're old as hell, and sadly, it means you're not going back to your beloved home come this fall.

Maybe this sad realization hasn't dawned on you yet. If it has, I'm sorry. If it hasn't, I'm sorry for bringing it up now.

The truth is, for the first time since you graduated, you finally realized that you're actually not going back to the place you called home for four odd years. IUP helped shape and define you as a person. It's part of who you are and something you will carry with you for the rest of your life. You are an IUP Alumni, and you should be "IUP Proud" as always.

But that's just it. You're alumni. Your biggest change yet is perhaps the simple realization that you're not an IUP student anymore, you graduated. You're done.

Post graduation could mean a lot of things for you. You may have recently started a new job or moved to a new city or started a new school to pursue a higher degree or maybe even all three. Maybe during post-graduation when everything was shiny, these new prospects excited you. But now, as the school year is beginning and you're not beginning with it, maybe you've come to see that this is actually your life now, not just a fun summer away from IUP.

It's a strange purgatory of life where your stuck between the place you once called home, IUP, and your new life, whatever that new life may be. You may still refer to IUP as your home, or IUP as your school, and it's not anymore.

Maybe you're realizing for the first time that your friends no longer live in the same house as you, on the same street as you, in the same city as you or maybe even in the same state as you. Maybe it's the distance that's taught you that you truly made your best friends in college - your lifelong friends. Or, maybe you're finally starting to realize that some of them weren't really your friends at all.

College is a strange place after all, a strange bubble, and it's outside that bubble that you're slowly starting to come to the realization that the real world is not IUP.

In the real world, there are no 25 cent drinks. You don't get a pitcher of beer for $2 and you don't drink a pitcher of beer by yourself. In the real world, there are no police horses or giant house parties contained by an orange fence.In the real world, concerts and sporting events aren't $10. In the real world, you don't necessarily get help any time you ask for it.

But thankfully, in the real world, there are IUP alumni. There are IUP alumni doing great things at great companies and in great organizations. There are IUP alumni who will work beside you or live beside you. There are IUP alumni at the new bars you discover. There are IUP alumni who still usually party. There are IUP alumni who are willing to help you the same way that IUP helped you.

So when you're sad or lonely or friendless or jobless, I assure you, there are IUP alumni. And I assure you, they will help you.

So even though fall semester at IUP is starting, and you won't be starting along with it, IUP is still very much a part of you. Embrace your new status as an IUP alumni, because if there's one thing that will bring you and all of IUP's glory back together again, it's being an alum.

IUP Homecoming here we come.