Memories: My Freshman Year Of College Experience

[Anonymous]

Schools are starting back up again, and having watched all these "move in day" vlogs with my cousin who is now on her way, it brought back all the great (and not so great) memories of my freshman year. Just wanted to brain dump my memories...

I went to a major university with a population of around 45,000. My experience going in was a little bit unique in that my high school was about 3 miles down the road. We had already had a lot of events and activities in high school at my university, so I felt like I already knew a bit of it pretty well. Second, 70% of my graduating class and my boyfriend went to my university with me so I was living in the dorms with them, had the same classes with them, hung out with them, and a few of them, I worked with off campus. I went to a smaller high school so we got along really well, and that bled into my university experience in the absolute best way possible.

The summer before college, they'd given us this packet of info on your dorm room and roommate. This was going to be a total stranger to me. As instructed, I tried calling her about 3x during the break, but she never responded and this led to A LOT of anxiety because I started to feel like, what if this girl hates me before I even get there. Apparently she was super busy, and had decided last minute to live off campus so...OH MY GOD...I ended up with one of the biggest rooms you can get on campus in my building, a corner room (if you know, you know) and it was all...to...myself!!! I had two beds, two closets, 3x the space and windows as the other dorms on the floor, two desks, two sets of drawers, 2 trash cans, and I could basically invite my friends over any time I wanted!

It wasn't all great news though. The last couple of months before high school ended, I found a lump in my breast. I FREAKED out because I was going to have to start my experience with cancer, something that was NEVER on my bingo card as anything I thought I'd have to deal with. One biopsy and a few consults later, they found it was a non cancerous growth, but we decided to have it removed, so literally 3 days before school was to start I had my first ever surgery, couldn't wear a bra for like a week, had all these bandages, and have had a life long 3 inch boob scar.

Move in day came, and I was more than ready. I packed up all my crap...like my entire room liek a psycho, and brought it. It was hella hot, I was hella tired, but my lovely parents sweated it out with me. They hugged me extra long and I shut the door, cranked up the music and started unpacking. Not ten minutes later, my dad calls me, and he's like, "hey kid, we miss you already, do you miss us." I did lie on the phone, but honestly, no. Love my parents, but I was sooo ready to be free and to start my new life. Having dealt with all the previous anxiety with my health, I just wanted to not think and have some f**king fun which I really did unpacking and arranging this huge room to myself. It was just such a happy memory for me.

A couple days later, school started, I had classes with my boyfriend, best friend, and a few other classmates from high school. We tried, really tried, to make other friends, but we realized it was just so much easier to hang out with ourselves.Plus it was super awkward for anyone coming in to our friend group because we had all these memories, and they'd be like, sooooo, I didn't go to your school, can you explain.

A month into school, all hell broke loose. Planes slammed into buildings, my aunt had to be evacuated from her corporate office in an abundance of caution, and it will forever be a day that I will never forget because it felt so incredibly surreal to walk around campus knowing the world was changing forever.

Second semester, boom, I got my first roommate. Long story short, she was awful. My dad threatened to go straight to housing to have her ejected by any means necessary because she thought she could have her boyfriend living with us, and there was an incident which I hope was not malicious, but I'll never know, but she moved out after just about a month of living with her.

Then I got a foreign roommate from Korea who spoke very little English. I'm not actually sure if we got along or not because communication was really hard. She used to leave me post it notes of things she wanted to say and then, how shall I say this, she ended up quite literally disappearing one weekend when I was at work. I came back to the dorms, thought I'd been robbed, but it was all her stuff that was gone, and I never saw her again. Some girls I'd never met showed up at my dorm at 3am asking where she was. I was like, can you tell me??? They barged in, saw her stuff gone and then left not saying a word making me really freak out, like wth?!? Allegedly, I was told about a month later, that she was being stalked by her angry Korean ex boyfriend who had found out where she lived and may have threatened her life so she left without saying a word. I never saw her ever again and I never found out from any real authority on the situation like the police or anything because I knew nothing about her, not a single friend, not her parents, nothing.

The rest of the year was all the best firsts, and getting used to campus life. I cannot tell you how incredibly fun it was to attend school with all these built in friends where we could just hang out, or club, or just run around campus doing crazy things. It was like high school but with ACTUAL adult freedom. And, I being the full on nerd I am, I went to class and never missed a day, ending the semester with a 3.5gpa. I was so thankful for my experience and for the fact that to this day, I am still 100% friends with my core group of 10 friends from high school until now which is so incredibly rare.