August 5th will always serve as an important day to me. On August 5th 2015, I left the life that I had built in Hawaii, transferring during my senior year to build a new one. 1 year later on August 5th 2016, I saw two of the best friends I had made that year, Utku Gorkem and Shanzeh Umerani, for the final time. The life I had built in Hawaii had been a good one, but the life built in McLean was a great one. The days leading up to the five day road trip to California didn't seem long enough and there never seemed to be enough time to see everyone. The difference between McLean and all the other places that I had moved to growing up as a military kid was that we were only going to get one year in McLean. One year to get to know a place. One year to start off new and make new friends.
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The funny thing was that one year was actually more than enough time to accomplish all of this. I immediately found McLean to be a very likeable place, through the older feel of our house or the school I was going to, and the trees surrounding our yard. The trees were actually one of the first things I noticed because they weren't palm trees, but big oak trees, only proving even further that I was about to start a new life. We left on August 18th, 2016 and I looked out the back window looking at McLean for the last time, knowing that this place was always going to have a place in my heart.
As I put my head against the window of the car, many thoughts were going through my head. First, was that I had done this just one year before on a plane. Second, how much I was going to miss McLean and all the amazing friends that I had made in one year. Third, what was going to happen next? How hard was it going to be to transition into college? How was I going to make as many great friends as I did my senior year? Well, all these questions were answered in a way that I wouldn't have ever thought of: Through a freshmen community service project.
The freshmen who met the requirements of long sleeve shirts and were able to get their form signed were bussed out to a beach where we would be cutting down a type of weed that was killing the bamboo down in a forest like area. This was the service project where I would meet two of my first and two of my best friends at Cal Lutheran, Asia Moore and Kayla Hoffman. We bonded over cutting weeds and tripping over tree trunks, but it was when Kayla gave us the name Asia Kayla Graham 2020 (shortened to AKG 2020), that I realized that I had made two great friends that were going to last a long time. I'll never forget sitting on the beach after the service project with Kayla and Asia, when we made 3 more friends and AKG 2020 quickly became AKGTKN 2020.
.College can be a hard time to make friends for anyone, but if you manage to meet the right people, those friendships are the ones that will last. Whether it was through the community service project, the in-n-out runs at 10:30 PM or the booming sound of Asia kicking my door when I didn't answer right away, I knew that these were the lasting friendships that I was going to make at Cal Lutheran and as much as I missed McLean, that was a year in my past now. College and California were what was in my present and from that point on, I couldn't wait until I was given opportunities to make more amazing friends.
