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Today, I went to pick up my cap and gown. I almost puked.

Wait, this is real? It still hasn’t set in. Graduation is two weeks away and I’m walking around campus in a haze of disbelief.

This is really it for my time here. No more BU Brain, no more long lines to print at the PODS. All of this, it’s over.

When I look back to where I was a few years ago, 17 years old and scared of everything, I don’t understand how I was able to walk out the front door each morning. In the past few years, I’ve learned to function as an independent member of society.

College isn’t just a place to learn about science and history; it forces you to become an adult.

My 17-year-old self didn’t know how to do laundry, wash dishes or cook anything that didn’t go in the microwave. Now, these things are part of my daily routine.

This entire experience has been life-changing, if for no other reason than it forced me out of my parents’ house. If I hadn’t left, I wouldn’t have learned how to fend for myself in the world. Gone are the days of my mom washing my clothes and changing my sheets — a skill I learned in October of my freshman year.

But it’s more than just that. College has given me one thing even more valuable than knowing how to clean pots and pans: direction.

At 17, I came here expecting to be going into grade 13, just repeating the same dull courses I’ve taken my entire academic life. What I soon realized is that college is about so much more than that. It’s about finding something you’re passionate about and chasing it.

If you had told me three years ago that I would be graduating college and attending law school in Washington, D.C., I would have laughed in your face. Majoring in political science? That’s a joke. I want to study art and math!

But as time went on, I realized that wasn’t the place for me. Sure, I was good at math, but I didn’t love it. I was just going through the motions. I started looking outside my comfort zone, first to economics, then to political science until I finally found my niche.

When I made the decision to pursue a legal education, there was a goal in sight. Now, waking up and going to class isn’t a struggle. I care about the things I’m learning and my grades have meaning. Taking on this responsibility was huge, something my 17-year-old self was never capable of doing.

This entire college experience would be incomplete without the people who got us through it. We all got thrown into this big, scary world together and it’s together that we learned to take our first steps as adults.

For many of us, the real world is just a blink of the eye away. Without the lessons of self-sufficiency and passion as well as the life-long friends we’ve made here, we’d all just be those scared kids too timid to walk out the front door of our very own real world apartment.