Possibly the best advice I can give to you incoming freshmen is this: forget everything. Until now, you’ve likely looked at college as a place for development, growth, and intellectual achievement. I thought the same way, but after only one year I’ve realized that this is completely false. Don’t get me wrong – you will undergo development, growth, and intellectual achievement, but college itself is largely irrelevant to this process. Rather, these characteristics grow internally, in an environment that happens to be that of higher education.

Instead, my advice to you is this: enjoy it. Do what you find fun, fulfilling, and fruitful. Join the clubs that interest you, study the subjects that fascinate you, and make friends with those that mesh with you. In other words: follow what comes naturally and everything else will fall into place. You develop yourself over these next four years, and you have complete control over what you want to do – unless you choose to give it away.

When I first walked past the arches of Wash U, I had the singular goal of getting a 4.0 GPA and becoming a successful professional in the future. Paying 25 grand a semester meant that I could waste no second in becoming a proud affluent individual that my parents could be proud of. However, that mentality soon dissolved as I realized that I didn’t just want to be an academic. I wanted to hang out with my friends, write for the newspaper (read: shameless plug), build audio amplifiers, and see Phish live. I was able to do all of the above (except for Phish, as their concert at the Pageant was cancelled two weeks before the show) and much more because my environment allowed me to do whatever it was that I actually wanted to do.

I’m still not quite sure where I am in my development as a person. I’m not really sure about what I want to do with the future, and I am perfectly comfortable in that uncertainty. I know that these four years are for experimentation and exploration, and that this uncertainty is intrinsically valuable.

And so, from this vantage point, I offer this: do what you love, and the rest will come. You won’t be able to predict what your life in college will be, and the journey is so unbelievably different for everyone that the famous “college experience” doesn’t really exist at all. The only experience is your own, and the responsibility to shape and build this experience belongs singularly with yourself.