This is a sponsored feature. All opinions are 100% from Her Campus.
Confessions of a Freshman
It’s a scary experience being a freshman, especially one moving over 1,000 miles away from home like most of the class of 2018 at Eckerd. It’s a time to start over and become whoever you want to be, with little to no connection to who you were at home, there is nothing holding you back from starting completely over. While this idea is very liberating it’s also quite terrifying. On move in day we were all excited, nervous, and a little bit scared for this new chapter to begin. Autumn Term was a rough time for most, figuring out who we wanted to be for these next four years, at least, of our lives. During those three weeks we figured out who we wanted to be, learned our way around campus, and thought we knew exactly where we stood with everything. Then the upperclassmen came back, and all those feelings from the first day we moved in came rushing back.
Now that we’ve been here a month, and had a full week with the upperclassmen back on campus it’s starting to feel like the college every expected. We’re all sick of the café and pub food and dying for a home cooked meal, people are starting to miss their families, Eckerd is feeling like home, and everyone is discovering that the Eckerd Bubble and the Freshman 15 are not made up concepts. We’re also taking part in the nightlife, meeting Meagan from Drag Queen Bingo, and making the friends and mistakes that we’ve been told to expect with college.
Moving so far from home was rough; I’m not going to lie. Missing seeing all of my friends off to college, missing the county fair, and knowing that I wouldn’t be able to partake in the football parties for the Saturday games anymore made the move harder than I was anticipating. I wasn’t planning on missing my parents, but I do, and I really miss my dog and my nephew. But at the same time college is so much more than I was expecting. I’ve grown as a person, met great people, and done things I never would have done before I came here. Reinventing yourself is a scary thing, but in the end it’s worth it.