A few days before my college graduation, my wallet disappeared. It was remarkably disorienting. The last week before graduation is surreal anyway. And now I was navigating it without cash, my student I.D., or the familiar lump in my back pocket. But once I gave up looking for it, I started to see the loss as symbolic of the whole disorienting, painful, and yet liberating process of letting go of college.
Freshman year can be disorienting, despite our best efforts at Orientation (and even pre-Orientation). Like someone moving to a foreign culture, you are going to have to figure out what the norms of your new community are – what everyone does and doesn’t do, what the expectations are.
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