It really is crazy how fast your college experience goes by. It all starts off on move-in day. Meeting strangers that become your roommates, walking around campus thinking how big it seems. Everything is so new and exciting. And then before you know it, you blink and it’s now about to be your senior year of college. 

Now everything is totally different. You’ve experienced so much and have met so many new people. Thinking back to freshman year you realize how much you’ve changed as an individual. For the past three years you’ve grown and matured each day without even realizing it. 

Maybe it was the opportunities you’ve experienced, the friends you’ve made, the things you have learned. Maybe it is the fact that the years you spend in college are also the years you transition into an adult. 

When first coming to college a person is usually fresh out of high school, still a teenager. It is tends to be obvious who the freshmen are on campus.

 As a freshman, you don’t see it but once you get a little older you can tell. They are the ones who still look like children, because they are. Especially boys. Boys grow physically so much during their time in college. They go from having a teenager body to more muscular and manly as their shoulders get bigger and broader. 

But the biggest change you go through in college isn’t exactly physical, it’s mental. Not only are you learning so much about the world from your classes, you start to learn who you are as an individual. 

You no longer have your parents to hide behind as they make decisions for you. You are on your own making important decisions for yourself. Graduating senior Nayeli Lopez shares her biggest growing period was freshman year. 

“Before I came to Sonoma my mom pretty much did everything for me,” said Lopez. “So my first year away at college, and away from my mom, I was finally able to feel independent. I could dress how I wanted, do my hair however I wanted, spend my days doing things that I planned. I just felt so free and by the end of the year I felt more like myself than ever. I knew what I wanted to do with my life and I knew how I wanted to go about it.”

That first year away from your parents is filled with freedom and adventure. You’re away at a new place and surrounded by mystery as everything around you is unfamiliar territory. 

The excitement typically does cause a little craziness and the amount of fun you begin to have makes you question how is this even legal? You can’t believe your parents would actually be promoting this going away to college thing. 

But after the first two years of college you get a little bit older and a little wiser and you start to realize what’s important and what’s not. 

“By my junior year I had to get a job,” said Sonoma State University student Alyssa Farber. “ I was also done with my GEs and  taking only major classes. That’s when I realized my priorities needed to change a bit. I needed all of my energy to go towards my school work and not being dead at work.”

As the years go on you start to get the whole college thing down. You’ve learned how to study, what GE classes to take and which ones to avoid, how important it is to have your professor know your name, and lastly you’ve learned that there is such as thing as true friends. 

College is nothing else but a learning experience, mentally and emotionally.