My freshman year of college is officially over, but you might still be waiting for graduation to roll around. It went by really fast, didn’t it? Just yesterday you were entering the doors of a new high school, greeting new teachers and preparing to learn not only what you would need to pass your SAT’s , but getting ready to learn a whole bunch of new things about yourselves in the process. The past four years have been an accumulation of events that have made you who you are, and the next few months will be no different. The months leading up to, and the months during, the beginning of your college career are going to be full of magnificent transformation. I changed a lot during my freshman year, so much that it seems like I am a completely different person. There were things I didn’t know, and wish I had, so I’m sharing some of them with you, because there are some things you’ll still need to figure out on your own.

You may not know everything about yourself right now, and you may even still be missing a few things while you embark on the adventures of freshman year, and that is totally okay. You’re going to make new friends, maybe lose a couple, and through these people and the experiences that come with them, you’re going to learn a lot about yourself and the people around you.

That being said, I wish I knew how to pick my friends better (i.e how to not keep toxic people in my life). You’ve already found a good group of people in high school, and you’ll need to do that all over again. You are going to meet handfuls of new people when you get to college, especially during orientation. You may find people who seem right for you, but eventually they may seem to drain you more than anything. These people are the ones to stay away from. It doesn’t matter if they shower you with compliments or buy you pizza every weekend, if you cannot be around them because it makes you feel like you want to hide under your bed forever, run like hell and find someone who will stay up and watch scary movies with you, that you don’t mind being with all day. Keep away from people that lie to you excessively, the ones who tell so many stories that you can’t tell when they actually mean something. If you aren’t into drinking but all of your ‘friends’ are, and they keep making you go (by the way, ‘No’, is an okay answer), you probably don’t need them in your life if partying isn’t your thing. Figure out who belongs in your life, and keep them there.

You don’t need to go to parties to have fun. In my mind, I thought that’s where all the fun people were, and that’s who I thought I wanted to be friends with. I went to one party, figured out it wasn’t my place to be, and that was the end of that. I know tons of people who have fun at parties, and others that don’t. Either way, you know how you like to have fun, and there are going to be many opportunities on campus to do fun things.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. I was never the kind of person that had to ask for help in high school classes. Like many of you, I had good grades and kept up with school work, it wasn’t a hard thing for me to do. When I got to college, I didn’t learn the material as easy as I had in college. Although I read the textbooks and took detailed notes, I didn’t have any good study habits to keep me going. I hadn’t needed those in high school, so when it came to it, I was really stuck with what I was learning. I didn’t ask for a tutor when I needed one for a certain class, and my grades suffered because of it. When I finally started asking questions about what wasn’t clear to me, things started getting better. I developed study habits that I would use throughout the rest of the year, and learned to always ask questions, because someone may have the same ones as you and just doesn’t want to ask.

Don’t be afraid to step out of comfort zone. Join clubs, go to events on campus, go play that giant game of manhunt happening on science field. The area out of your comfort is where you’re going to learn the most about yourself, and make some of the best memories you’ll ever have. Life begins outside of your comfort zone, so take advantage of all the opportunities that lie ahead of you!

Good luck, Class of 2016! May you transform ever so greatly.