As I write this column, I am sitting at a café in the East Village of New York City. It is raining and I am watching the droplets trickle down a dilapidated window next to me – seemingly random, infinite in their movements, impossible to track. I ended up here for the summer because innocence is something that is running out, and new experience is something that I now actively seek.

New experiences were plentiful during my own freshman year. I’ll be honest: I took on classes that were probably too hard and cried when I didn’t earn the straight A’s I’d expected. I entered a prematurely serious relationship with a graduating senior – and earned a premature sense of worry about the real world. I rushed, pledged, and disaffiliated from a sorority. I threw up in toilets and got kicked out of a fraternity house after falling down on a dance floor (within my first week). I changed my prospective major from English to Econ to PNP to IPH to Econ to English. I gained 15 pounds from a silent trifecta of alcohol, late-night quesadillas, and sloth. I bonded with my freshman floor over the things that one can perhaps only bond over on freshman floors: vodka watermelons, endless Guitar Hero, prank wars, and incessant gossip.

Looking back, I was enthralled – excited that my parents would not be there to witness my walk of shame, thrilled that this university had allowed me to take an upper-level class. Would I do it differently if I could go back to live my freshman year over again? Probably.

But here’s the catch, an important caveat that you may already know, and if you don’t, one that you will discover when you arrive: these mistakes, which you will certainly make – these failed relationships and wrong academic decisions and late-night quesadillas – these are what will shape you. Your most profound truths will be found unexpectedly; they will enter you in the guise of experience.

Over time, you will learn habitual independence: you will learn to wake up for your 9 a.m. lecture, to go to the gym, to talk to your professors, to call your mother without being nagged. Your introductions will change from a sheepish wave to a firm handshake.

So much of the beauty of college consists in an infinite sense of future lessons of experience – this constant feeling that you do not know, cannot know, where you will be sitting in another year. In the end, we are all like these droplets that I cannot keep track of – we are new and fresh and fallen from somewhere, and we will drip somewhere else afterwards, attracting and repelling along the way, enthralled by the experiences that come to shape us.