Dear first-year college student,
Congrats you made it to campus. Roll your sleeves up after you’re done using your sleeves to wipe your tears after saying that first goodbye to your parents. There’s so much work to be done and you will cry every time you’re dropped off to campus every year. The realization that you’re on your own gets scarier as senior year slowly creeps upon you.

That first week is the hardest. It isinks in that you’re on your own and no one is going to force you to show up as your best self as the tuition gotta be paid regardless of what version of yourself you show up with.

After that first week, the first month feels like a hamster wheel because you have no idea if you’re doing college let alone anything right. “What am I here? Do I even belong?” I asked myself that first month as I sat in a basic reading class offended as I’d been reading/writing all of my life and I didn’t test out of that class. That first month I felt like an 18-year-old toddler learning how to walk again as high school did not prepare me for college. I cried so much freshman year trying to get off that hamster wheel.

Mid-semester something kicks in, you take a deep breath, build routines, find your tribe (they’re your forever friends), understand the syllabus, and make it work for you and it gets better. It gets so much better that you look back sophomore year questioning how you didn’t quit and survived.

Freshman year taught me that I wasn’t alone. Everyone else was also anxious, frustrated, lonely, and just trying to figure it out. Apparently, I didn’t know as much as I thought that I knew. Time would manage me if I didn’t figure out how to manage it. Say no to the credit card offers, fitness isn’t that bad, and budgeting will become your best friend.

At the time Carlow was all girls so I studied as I worked out in a very empty fitness room where I learned that working out was a stress reliever. Those aforementioned lonely, frustrated, anxious people would become some of my best friends. College forced us to grow together and be the people we leaned on when we felt that we couldn’t stand on our own two feet.

College was a roller-coaster and in that first couple of months, you’re just going uphill building that foundation. Occasionally the way down you’ll get in a loop but it will be one heck of a ride and you’ll cry when it’s over because you’ve grown so much and can’t do it over again, not that you would want to.