After graduation, you enter that no man's land

When you're a little kid, your parents talk about how you are destined to go to Harvard, or Yale, and grow up to be a wonderfully successful person. However, as you mature, you learn that Harvard and Yale are a little out of your league, but college is a definite thing.

By the time you hit middle school, you have this realization that you will eventually grow up and get to experience this wonderful thing called college, but it's still so far off that you don’t spend too much time considering it.

Then you move on to high school. And as a freshman, you're totally naive about the ways of the world. You're plucked out of a calm, secure environment called junior high, and moved to a seemingly endless sea of people (who are twice your height). College is not totally out of grasp at this point, but it's still years away.

In your sophomore year, you have friends who actually get to go to college. You watch them change from dorky teenagers to weird college students. They start to find the people with whom they will hopefully spend the rest of their life, or so they think; choose their career paths; and become their own person, without any help from their parents.

Junior year comes along, and you're all of a sudden grade conscious. Colleges are interested in you. That 3.5 GPA (or better) is all you want, plus at least a 26 on your ACT. You now have lots of college student friends, and can hardly wait to be a college student yourself. You begin to search for the school to call your own--and maybe you’ll even find one.

Senior year, is such a blast. You're overwhelmed with everything you can possibly imagine. Teachers are trying to cram in as much material as they can before they send you off into the world. Scholarship applications all have deadlines, of course with no guarantee that you'll get one, even after the hours of work you put into them. Let's not forget colleges sending you piles of paperwork that have to be signed, once you've been accepted to their school. May 1 seems decades away, but you have faith that it will eventually get here.

After graduation, you enter that no man's land. You're not yet a college student, but at the same time you’re not a high schooler either. College is two months away, and you're about to climb walls as you wait for those two months to pass.

Finally, you head to your college’s Freshman Orientation. It's not exactly what you call fun, but it does give you a place to call home. You realize that college is just around the corner, and you can't wait to get there. That is when the fun begins, right?

And in what is perhaps the biggest surprise of all, your parents transform from wanting you to stay, to nagging you to figure out exactly what you're going to bring with you.

Of course, you manage to put these worries off for the whole summer until it is the weekend before you move in. You realize that three days later, you will be living in a totally different world, where no one does your laundry, or fixes you PB&J sandwiches when you want. This sends you into a mad rampage during which you pack everything you could ever possibly need.

Somehow, you manage to get all of your "stuff" into the car just in the nick of time, as you depart for your beloved new home. Your parents take you to this new place and tearfully say goodbye as they lead their baby into the uncharted territory of college life. What happens next? Only time can tell.