Dear Freshman Me,
Graduation is quickly approaching and just like that, four quick years are gone. I am sitting here writing this letter to you because knowing what I know now, there are a lot of things I wish I were able to tell you back then. College was an experience of many ups and downs and it involved a lot of trial and error. The biggest advice I want to give you is enjoy this time. In a blink of an eye, you are graduating and the real world starts to set in.
Freshman year was filled with new experiences and new surroundings. It was your first time away from home. We didn’t have mom there to hold our hand and do our laundry. We had to figure it out for ourselves or we wouldn’t have any clean clothes. But guess what, you did it, and that was just the first milestone of many more to come. Once we conquered our laundry, it was time to move onto something more on the larger scale. You were in a totally new atmosphere and you didn’t know who anyone was. Your friends from high school may not have been there, so it was time to make some new friends. You were able to put yourself out there and soon enough, you had your group. These friends became your family away from home and they are who you spent every day with.
As time went on and you moved passed your freshmen year, friends drifted and went in separate directions. Maybe a lot of your friends you met your first year transferred to other schools or decided not to come back. Now you’re back to square one, and trying to make new friends. Maybe it was harder now because a lot of people had their group from the previous year. I wish I could tell you back then to not worry because the people you are meant to be friends with come into your life naturally. I am so glad you decided to get involved with various groups on campus. Because of this decision, you met the friends that would be with you the rest of you college career and beyond college. It is with these people that you enjoy college and experience life with. They encouraged you to push yourself in everything you did. Without them, college wouldn’t have been the same for you. Now you are all graduating in a few short weeks or some of them may still be in college, and you know deep down that these people will be in your life forever and it makes the struggle you went through worth it.
Now that you have your friends, it was time to focus on the reason you came to college, your education. It was normal that you didn’t know what you wanted to do. Some kids may have had it all figured out, but that wasn’t everyone and that wasn’t you. I wish I could tell you back then to not stress yourself out over not knowing what to study or what you wanted to be. I wish I could have told you, you have time to figure it out. That’s what college is all about – it’s figuring out who you are. It took you a couple tries to figure out what you wanted to study but guess what, just like the laundry, you did it. You found something you love and are passionate about and now you’re graduating with a degree that means something to you. This degree is a sign of everything you overcame in your four years, all of the trials and triumphs you went through to get to where you are. You have been through a lot in just four years, and now it’s time for the next journey.
There is one final thing I wanted to tell you: Thank you. Thank you for starting out in the big scary journey called college. Without you we wouldn’t be here getting ready to step out into the real world. You did a great job getting us to this point and now it’s time for me to continue on.
Until our next journey,
Member of MSMC Class of 2019