By Laurel Evangelista
When I graduated high school, I was promised that college would be the best four years of my life. And now with graduation being just ten days away, I’m not sure if those promises I was given at eighteen ever really came to fruition. No one ever tells you that the dorm room that you’ve so carefully designed for months on Pinterest is going to be dark, small, and smell faintly of stale Chinese food. No one thinks to mention that even though you’ve spent the past twelve years starting school at 7:30 in the morning, those 8:00 am classes will seem like an impossible, daunting task. I was most definitely never promised under-cooked dining hall burgers and not one person thought to warn me that there would never be parking spots. Ever.
No one warns you about just how broke you’ll be after buying the mandatory textbooks that you’ll never even open. No one tells you what to do the first time you get sick and there isn’t a doting parent to bring you soup or take your temperature. Not one person wrote alongside a congratulatory card that sometimes roommates suck, or that there will always somehow be an ungodly amount of hair stuck in the shower drain. No one tells you that you’ll end up crying in the bathroom stall in the library because the paper is due at 11:59 and it’s now 11:58 and you are a thousand words short of the word count.
But through all of that, through the tears, and the fights and the regrettable choices that usually manifest themselves in the vomit that judges you from the toilet bowl, college isn’t all that bad. You’re finally out of your own, a real, (almost), adult. You meet the people that you didn’t even know you were missing. You find your passion even if that means changing your major three times. You grow and you change and you become the person you were always supposed to be. College isn’t easy but that’s because it’s not supposed to be. College isn’t the best four years of your life but it isn’t the worst. So while I may be more than ready to walk across that stage and out of FSU, I will never regret the time I’ve spent here. So for everything, the good, the bad, and the downright gross, thank you Fitchburg State.