This story was featured in Horizons, a special edition of The Crimson White for freshmen and transfer students. Horizons can be found on newsstands across campus, or online here.

Adults asked you what you planned to study when you had just finished the first grade. Your parents may have started saving for college the day you were born. You have sacrificed sleepless nights of studying, immersed yourself in extracurriculars and gone on tours across the country just for this one moment.

The college experience is some unimaginable goal that we work toward for the first 13 years of our education. In senior year, very few conversations could go without mention of what college you might be attending.

There is no shortage of opinions on what the experience should mean to you, or any other student. For many decades it has been seen as not just the cornerstone of your future career but also one of the most memorable times of your life.

Why, exactly, does the experience of college have such a standing in our cultural dialogue? It is an endeavor of academic achievement and of commitment to working hard.

But it is also four years of loneliness, of broken relationships and nights where the future seems like some distant concept. It is four years of self-doubt and the belief that everyone around you is more capable than you are. You begin to look around at the accomplishments of your peers and question what innate factor they have in them that you are missing.

This kind of atmosphere lends itself to growth and self-understanding that occur way beyond any academic setting. When we enter college, we undergo many changes at once. We move out of the homes that we have likely lived in for years. We may move across states or countries, knowing no one, in the pursuit of education.

While college is something that we look forward to for more than a decade of our lives, it is also something that we may have spent little time preparing for. We prepared for applications and we were successful in doing so, but we may not be prepared for how we feel in our dorm on the third week of class when life itself still seems so new and unattainable.

These lonely experiences and the struggles that we go through in college are just as important as any academic achievement or any moment of happiness that campus life might bring you. For it is in these moments that we begin to learn who we are. We begin to see our own resilience. We find ourselves years later in the exact place where we had longed to be for all of our lives. We look around, and somehow everything is okay.

It would be unwise to say that any high schooler has not gone through their fair share of struggles. The atmosphere of high school itself can be draining for many students. However, college, and the experience of adulthood that comes with it, prompts new struggles that we may feel unequipped to deal with.

During the second semester of my freshman year, I decided to be ambitious. Every time I saw an opportunity that even remotely interested me, I applied to it. I told myself that whatever result my application got, I would be okay. I had confidence in myself that regardless of what happened I would still move forward.

In the weeks to come, I received rejection letter after rejection letter. After the first, I just assumed that opportunity was not meant for me. After the second, I kept that same mindset and continued to pursue other things. After the sixth rejection letter, my confidence began to waver. In the span of six weeks, I received six rejections and knew of nothing else to pursue.

After receiving this sixth rejection letter, I excused myself from hanging out with friends and walked to my car. I held it together as I drove back to Ridgecrest and the second that I parked, I began to cry.

I cried as I thought about how I missed my friends from high school. I cried as I realized that some of them I had not spoken to for months. I cried for my mom, who had been busy at work recently and whom I hadn’t had a conversation with in a while. I cried for my future self, thinking that I had already set her up for failure, since it was clear to me that I wasn’t good at anything.

Just two weeks later, every freshman was sent from campus to spend the rest of the semester at home. It appeared to me that the world falling apart mirrored my old world falling apart. Everything felt stacked against me, and it was hard to feel like I had worth and value. 

With the hindsight of more than a year and a half, I am more grateful for this time in my life than any other time of college. This time was a breaking point. And I began to realize that it was up to me to decide what to do with the broken pieces. 

I have received many more rejections since this point, although now I welcome them. Without this time of struggle, I would have never known the innate resilience that I have within me.

I have successfully navigated my first fights with close friends in college, and come out on the other side with a better understanding of each other and a closer friendship because of it. I have received a parking ticket in the same week that my wallet was stolen. I have immersed myself into new opportunities and new spheres of involvement that are actually much better suited to me than those I originally applied for.

I began to realize that whenever I am rejected from something it means that I am not the right person for it. Perhaps other people were more prepared than I was; perhaps their interests were more aligned with the organization’s mission. Regardless of the reason, I now know that a rejection is not a signal of my lack of worth. It’s an opportunity for me to learn a little bit more about myself.

It is the struggles, more than the successes, that shape who we are in college and into adulthood. They enable us to be more empathetic and to extend kindness to other people. While the atmosphere of academia can sometimes be perceived as having an air of pretentiousness, or elitism, it is in kindness to each other that we find our strength beyond an academic course. When we insert kindness and unity into academia, we are better enabled to tackle learning in a more interesting way.

When we gain an understanding of ourselves and the way we operate in this world, we are not just students. We are people that take the education we receive and use it to better the lives of those around us. We become leaders, and fully realized individuals with unique sets of knowledge, experience and character that we may use in conjunction with others to change the world.

Kurt Vonnegut once said that it is our prerogative to make societies in which the epidemic of loneliness is solved. There is certainly an epidemic of loneliness on college campuses. No one is unique in this feeling. While it may feel like we are the only ones who don’t have it together, it’s actually one of the only unifying factors throughout the human experience to feel loneliness and to fail.

There is beauty in such a universal experience. There is the opportunity to become our best selves so that we may better others as well.

Another one of my favorite philosophers is Taylor Swift. Like she one said, I haven’t met the new me yet. I know that I have not met the new me yet, and I hope that I never do. I hope the spirit of resilience and community and kindness and intellectual humility that I have learned in college will extend way beyond my four years here. I intend to take these lessons with me throughout the rest of my lifetime and use them so that my self growth never ends.

So go out into the world of these four years. Be lonely. Fail. Scream. Love. In doing so, you may one day meet the “new you,” and thanks to the growth atmosphere of college, they will be someone worth waiting for.