I am sitting here writing and thinking about all the dreadful things I have to do in the very near future. I have an exam at 8 a.m., two labs tomorrow, night class, a room to clean, a package to send my best friend from home and a mom to call. I need to email one of my professors and stop by the career center tomorrow. I missed a meeting tonight and have to miss a sorority function on Wednesday.

Not a single one of those things is unmanageable, but together it can be unbelievably overwhelming. The kind of overwhelming that you can’t even fathom until you go to college and start making commitments. I’m in a sorority, I work on campus, I write for Odyssey, and I refuse to skip class. Life at college comes at you fast, and it’s so easy to get caught up in the stress of it!

Now I’m not here to complain. I’m here to commiserate and provide a little nugget of excitement amidst this stressful first round of tests and papers. Last year I did not take my first college exams seriously, and I’m sure you can imagine how disappointed I was when I got those grades back. Now I understand how necessary it is to make studying a priority, even when your list of priorities is long.

But speaking from experience, I just want to remind everyone that although we all have things we dread, there is also so much to look forward to!!

First we can go ahead and address the obvious. The weather is already cooling off, and these temperatures are one of the reasons I moved to Texas from Chicago. It’s absolutely gorgeous outside! How can you be upset when the sun is shining in that big blue sky? Today as I was walking back from the library, I noticed that the trees in front of Sadler are losing their leaves, and I was beyond excited. The leaves on the ground were such a welcome subtle reminder of home that I couldn’t help but have my mood boosted.

In other news, it’s victory season! Even if going to them isn’t your thing, it’s still fun to see your friends, classmates, brothers and sisters get dressed up and take pictures. At the very least it is Facebook stalking at its finest.

Finally, the rest of the non-school-related parts of first semester are so exciting! Not only do we have the rest of a glorious Horned Frog football season to look forward to, but soon we also get fall break, Thanksgiving break, and (my personal favorite) the TCU Tree Lighting Ceremony! Is it a little early to already be this excited about Christmas? Maybe. But that won’t stop me from looking forward to it. And that’s not even mentioning the things we get to look forward to every single day. I look forward to getting to come home to my roommates every day after class, the random sightings of old friends in the library or the BLUU, and of course those magical days when there’s a petting zoo in the commons.

Long story short, life at TCU is great. Sometimes it gets really easy to forget that when we are constantly thinking of our tests, papers, jobs, meetings, and other obligations. So I urge you to instead remember all of the things that drew you to TCU, and of course all of the great things we have to look forward to.