As I sit on Facebook, Instagram and twitter scrolling through the generic freshman college pictures, I can’t help but wonder how long the magic will last. A week? A month? The whole first semester? Either way the nostalgia hits me right where it hurts because it reminds me of how horrible my freshman year went. Now I’m not saying everyone’s should be or will be terrible, but I’m rather recognizing that there is a possibility it could go not how you had planned for. Between the underage drinking, hire stakes in school, and all of the strong influences around you, college really is whole new world. In that whole new world, the average freshman is at the bottom of the college food chain being the target of many upperclassman and susceptible to many things. Here are a few things I learned during my freshman year.

Fake friends come and go as fast as pizza does at a school event:

During your first few weeks at school you meet a ton of new people you can see yourself staying friends with for the rest of your life. You can see it now: living together next year in a house decorated with roommate pictures, family dinners, and spending every moment together as roomies. As time goes on and “life happens,” wedges are driven between you and sooner than later you don’t talk anymore. Time always has a way of showing you who people really are and sometimes it really hurts. Learning from it only helps you become a stronger person. Sometimes it takes a long time to tell who the fake ones are, but you will always know. My advice is to go with your gut. If you’re questioning how good of a friend someone really is, chances are they aren’t a good one.

Partying comes with a cost:

Let’s get real here for a moment: a good majority of college freshman start drinking and experimenting with other substances; it’s like a second nature. What freshman don’t realize is partying really does come with a cost. The cost can range from a few things, including weight gain, having tight funds, and losing friends. When you add alcohol to your normal diet your body will obviously have to adjust to it and weight gain can be the factor. Alcohol isn’t cheap, and underage consumptions aren’t either. Unless if you’re going to be taking straight shots of Karkov (bless your soul) alcohol isn’t cheap. The cost of friendship was the hardest lesson for me to learn. One night all of my “friends” received underage consumptions while I got off scotch free because I hadn’t been drinking. From that moment on there was a wedge between me and my three “friends." As a result, I was bullied out of a lease we had all signed for a house the next year. In the end, I learned some valuable lessons.

Academics aren’t a cake walk:

It feels like just yesterday I was handed back my first biology test and I BOMBED it hard. I soon realized that college was not going to be as easy as high school was. Not only were the academics more rigorous, you had to apply to get into programs and there were many hoops you have to jump through to get into programs. After some good cries and hard work when you finally get where you’re going everything seems to have a way of falling into place. Nothing in life is free, and if it was would it really mean something to you? If everyone got in the program you’re working your ass off to get in would it be an accomplishment to get in? Hard work pays off but it may take time.