Four years full of happiness, misery and everything in between.

Now that this bittersweet moment of graduation has almost come to fruition, I am finally beginning to contemplate how my college experience at Binghamton University has helped me.

People around me always say that college is a ‘learning experience.’ Common things I have heard throughout college include such gems as, ‘It’s OK that you didn’t do well and had to transfer from your first major and now have a low GPA ‘ it’s a learning experience.’

The phrase ‘learning experience’ seems like a gentle way of saying ‘you made mistakes and now you have to live with them.’

Those mistakes can be anywhere between saying something stupid to put a hole in a friendship or getting that bad grade in a class and feeling like it’s been marked on your forehead and won’t wash away for anything.

But everything has slowly dulled with time and the marks of mistakes fade, while never completely vanishing.

After struggling for three years to erase my mistakes from the freshman engineering program, I will finally be leaving the halls of this University with what amounts to a quite average GPA, no job lined up for myself and the concept of living with my parents again cemented to my future.

My friends and family have continued to pat me on the back and tell me that I will be OK, I will find a job eventually and that my employers won’t look down on me for those poor grades in the computer classes that were way over my head.

So what is to happen now? My mistakes have certainly faded with time, but erasing them is just something I cannot do. College has forced me to accept that fact.

But that doesn’t seem to distress me as much as it used to.

Looking back on the last four years, I see that I have taken my supposed tragedy of a learning experience and run with it. Grades have changed from devastating to good, people I have met as a freshman have gone from acquaintances to the people I can’t live without.

I seem to have managed all these things by accepting mistakes when they come.

Living life to the fullest seemed like such a clich√É© statement, but in actuality, that is one of my best learning experiences in college. Opportunities can come and go, but without taking risks and learning to push past mistakes you may never truly reveal your greatest strengths.

Learning to take a chance on something, and having the ability to take poor decisions in stride, is what college has taught me.

So when I finally stand in the Events Center on that fateful day, no matter what mistakes have been made, graduation should be a cause for celebration.

I’ve decided that regardless of what special cord you get to wear or what your diploma says, all that really matters is that you survived and have hopefully emerged with your own stories to share.