As freshman year comes to a close - abruptly and without warning – we, the members of the Class of 2019, are all reflecting on the things we have learned. Somehow, all the things people told us would happen, did happen. We lost touch with more people than we thought we would from high school. We stayed in touch with some unexpected ones. The friends we met at the beginning of the year didn’t actually end up becoming our friends. We gained and (kind of) managed to lose the Freshman 15, and suddenly however much sleep we get is never enough.
We’re learning like crazy. I’ve had more information crammed into my brain in 10 classes this year than in every year of high school combined. Maybe it’s because we're beginning to be surrounded by the things we actually want to learn, and by people who want to learn it just as much as we do.
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We’ve learned that by being separated from your parents, you learn how to make your own food and set your own curfew (we're still working on that one). More importantly, you end up learning a lot about yourself, and what you believe in, and what you want. We’ve also learned that our parents are almost always right about those things anyway.
We’ve learned that those first three months we spent dashing around to every party we could find and taking Snapchat stories pretending to have more fun than we were, weren’t actually that much fun. We’ve learned that sometimes, pushing all the couches together in the common room with our bed pillows and takeout Chinese to watch Lilo and Stitch on a Saturday night is actually what we wanted to do all along.
We’ve learned a lot about loyalty, and about what friendship means. The people you want to keep around are the ones who bring you snacks while you’re pulling an all-nighter to finish a paper you’ve procrastinated writing for two weeks. I've learned to hang on to those who have challenged me to reevaluate what I stand for and not leave them for what is comfortable.
Finally, we've learned most of all that we don't know anything about anything, and that getting used to adulthood isn't smooth at all, but more like trying to feel your way through a dark room you don't recognize while bumping into furniture looking for a light switch. Hopefully we will be able to figure it out at some point in the next three years.
All in all, freshman year was a year of learning. It was wildly fun, endlessly confusing, and a wake-up call for us to see what the world is offering.
