College is a time to learn and grow, and to meet new people. The years that you take to start and complete a degree (no time discrimination here) can be the most unbelievable years of your adolescent to adult years. Some teenagers start college classes at seventeen or eighteen, and they don’t realize that these years will have a big impact on your life.

I, for one, did not realize this. I started college at seventeen, moving out of my childhood home to live with in a dorm room with one other girl and two girls across the suite bathroom that the four of us would share. It was a good first year, honestly. It wasn’t terribly hard, but it was a change from high school. Adjusting to sharing a room that was smaller than the one I had lived in for sixteen years of life prior was a little bit of a challenge, but it wasn’t impossible.

I had a good first roommate. There have been horror stories about first roommate situations following blind pairings, but I was lucky. I found good friendship with my suite mates in that year, and that good turned into great, and great turned into best friendship with those two, and we picked up a fourth friend into the mix during our junior year. The fourth one is a girl I went to high school with, and we were able to continue and grow our friendship during our college years.

Three of us have since graduated, and the fourth will graduate this May. We still keep in touch, and hang out from time to time. The four of us have shared many great memories together, and hopefully have many more to make in the future.

I never dreamed that I would find true friendship, especially in people I was forced to live with. But the fact that we had to live together made us spend quite a bit of time with each other during the first year, and in the years following, we just hung out together by choice because we enjoyed being friends that much.

I’m so glad to call you three my friends —Bethanie, Hayley, and Sarah— and I hope we always remain friends, even as we grow up (more), and live separate lives, because we don’t all live together anymore, although sometimes we all miss the four friends living the apartment life together.

I am so thankful to have met (and reconnected with) these wonderful people in my college years. They —and many other AQ friends— have made me miss college all that much more, despite only having graduated about six months ago. Being a real adult with a degree has proven to be exhausting, and I’ll always miss my college years with the amazing people I met during those years at Aquinas College.