Ah, yes, college. Big, beautiful, bold. If you’re looking for an article where I talk about how college is big, beautiful, and bold, you should probably stop reading. For those of you who just finished up your first year, or for those who just want to reminisce, the first year of college is like a Taylor Swift song: a magical life transition where loneliness, frustration, and stress mingle with excitement, pride, and happiness that you simultaneously want to break up with, but never leave. From your first homework assignment (I gotta read how many pages?) to your first midterm (what is studying? How does one study?) to your first final (what do you mean it’s cumulative? As in, eight months of work?) college has made you question every life choice you have made so far.

Let’s start from the beginning, shall we? You enter the University of So-and-Such or Enter-Town-Name-Here College and you look around you with all that wide-eyed wonder, thinking how awesome it’s going to be to be a college kid. You’ll be a straight-A student, have a ton of friends, look all fashionable just like on TV and in the movies...oh young one, how you make me laugh! Fast-forward three months and you’re almost done with your first semester. You realize you’ve made a terrible miscalculation. There’s a whole lotta work and so little time in the day, your brain hurts and all you want to do is get eight hours of sleep, and that meme you saw online of a dog smushing its nose against a window… well, that’s a pretty good representation of how you feel right now. You can’t wait to go home for break and relax, but there’s so much to do before then! You sigh and let your head fall against the keyboard of your laptop. Where your lab report should be, a whole twenty rows of ‘n’ is filling up the blank page.

Moving on to just after spring break. This semester is a little easier; you’ve learned from the mistakes you made last semester and you also taught yourself to drown out negativity. Yes, there are people who may be doing better than you, but that doesn’t matter. They’re not you. You’re pretty dang awesome just as you are. You’ve gotten pretty good grades so far, found out what studying method works best for you, became a darn good speed reader/skimmer, and you know how to plan (whips out planner and winks). Yeah, you may not be perfect, but you don’t need to be. You’ve got friends who like you for you, a good head on your shoulders, and a whole lot of dreams just waiting to happen. You’re just starting out, so don’t sweat it. A baby bird isn’t born knowing how to fly, it has to learn, so don’t beat yourself up just because everything is so new.

Finally, move-out day. You’ve cleaned up your room (your first dorm room), said goodbye to your roommate (you’re first college roommate), and you’re starting to look around at the bare walls of the place you once called home (for a whole academic year). Here is the place where Hulu and Netflix reign, where junk food is second-breakfast (8:30 classes are hard, OK?), and where you sometimes cried a little because homesickness is a dastardly disease. Yet you made it. You made it through a whole year of college. Your older, more mature, smarter. If you can handle college, then you can handle anything. Well, almost anything. Moving out is harder than moving in, and all that junk you accumulated over the past year, you need to figure out what to do with it before you head home.