Last semester, due to various reasons, my friend group broke up a bit. I still had my close-knit group, but it was harder to see everyone as much as we would like. In the beginning of November, however, we had one night that almost everyone was back together. I always thought it’d be a lot of small talk and catch up but it wasn’t. It was nothing but continuous flowing conversation about the most wild topics, just as it had been five months before. Some of us went five months without really seeing each other or talking, and we felt like none of us had ever left.
College is all about learning about yourself. You grow here and find yourself, and these friends are the ones that watched you go through it. Maybe some of them are even the reason you got to where you are. I know I never would’ve been the person I am without my college friends. They challenged me to be me, and for the first time in my life I felt like I got it.
Know that this is the only time in your life, UMass Collegiettes, that you will be surrounded by so many other people with so many different cultures. There are so many people to reach out to. These people and connections may be in your life forever. I trust my friends to keep me young. When I stress about my kids in college, they’ll remind me about my keg stands and how at least my kids will study more than me.
Let’s be serious and sum it up here: no one but a UMass Collegiette is going to understand exactly how college was for UMass Collegiettes. We’re a school that is so proud to be who we are. We take pride in being UMass kids, and that’ll always be a bond that you’ll only have with your college friends.
That’s enough for me.