Grappling With Change: My Transition from High School to College

By: Rylee Cassidy

It’s finally spring. The birds are chirping, the weather has finally hit 60 degrees, and you are now able to walk around without bundling up in your knee-length winter coat. Another thing that the beginning of spring means is that the school year is coming to an end. For seniors (in highschool or college), this could be bittersweet, but for the rest of us it marks the transition of becoming one year older, both physically and academically. Coming from a small town while having an extremely tight-knit group of friends, moving into college was a day that we knew would come eventually, but we never fully were ready for. Now, as I sit here in my freshman year dorm only three weeks from being done with my freshman year of college, I want to share my experience coming out on the other side of my first year of college.

Change is Inevitable

Like I stated earlier, I come from a small town where everyone knows everyone and friend

groups are basically solidified from kindergarten and beyond. Due to this I have a very close

friend group where we essentially grew up together, and to those of us who didn’t have sisters, there they were. When we would be hanging out there would be times where one of us would mention leaving for college and just like that everyone would go silent, we always knew this was a reality, but we never actually expected it to happen. Senior year came and went and all of us (except for two) chose different colleges, up and down the East Coast. Things were getting very real, some of us were having a harder time with moving out than others. It was an emotional goodbye, however in the beginning months we still made sure to send almost daily updates to our group chat.

As we continued on with our respective semesters, these texts and check-ins got few and far between. This upset me, not because I felt ignored, but because I honestly longed for the way we were a few months ago, all in the center of each other's lives knowing nothing could tear us apart. After a few weeks I finally accepted the fact that things were different now and that I would have to reach out to some of my friends to hear how they were doing. I couldn’t blame them though, we were all busy. When I expressed my concerns about this change, my family responded by saying that it would be like no time had passed when we would all be reunited.

Well, reunited we did, and to my relief things were mostly the same, except now we mostly

talked about college (obviously). My brain could not handle that we no longer lived in the same town all year round and saw each other in the school hallways everyday. When everyone talked about their new flings or friends it was subtle unknowing of “who was on top. ” Someone you spend everyday with now, or someone you share history with.

All in all, leaving home for college is a topic that has been discussed before, but no one really tells you the intricacies of it all. Saying goodbye to home, both the place itself and the people that make it up, is an extremely hard thing to do, and it is even more confusing when having to start all over. When I first came to college, I searched for people I could meet here that would emulate the essence of my hometown friends. I soon realized this would be an impossible feat as my friends are each unique in their own ways that I love them for. If you are struggling with the transition from high school to college and what this means for your friend group, I urge you to embrace the change and be open minded with everyone you meet at college. Just because we aren't in the same place we were a couple months ago, does not mean the memories we share mean nothing. In the beginning of my first semester I spent my days missing my hometown friends and the memories we shared, now I still miss them but I am grappling with the fact that those memories are in the past and there are better ones we will make in the future.