This is a picture of me and my great friend Shannon on our graduation day in 2012. She is my first and last; that is, we were roommates our freshman year and our senior year. There are many things I don’t miss about my four years in higher ed, but living amongst my closest friends isn’t one of them. If I could go back to any moment in my life, I think I would choose walking into the student union and seeing a table of my friends, laughing and working.

College was brutal. I almost didn’t finish. My friends gave meaning to my pain. If that sounds dramatic, that’s because it was. College is nothing if not dramatic, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. For four years, my universe was a bucolic, neoclassical (and neoconservative) postage stamp in a part of the country I didn’t know existed until I moved there. Commencement was a blur, with a dull speaker and many, many photos. I wanted to sleep for a month and forget about the angst of my final semester.