I am graduating at the end of this semester. In ten days, two hundred and forty hours, 14400 minutes, and 864000 seconds I will no longer be a college student. Because you are probably reading this at least a couple of days after I wrote it even more time will have gone by. This past couple of weeks has felt like the beginning of a roller coaster when the car is slowly rising and you know that in any minute it will plunge down. But before I leave UPS for good I want to acknowledge some of the people that made my experience here special: my friends. Every college student needs them. If only to have someone they can borrow meal points off of. I am going to make a list here of things my friends have done for me this semester that I am grateful for.

• Providing chocolate. I have been mooching chocolate off of one of my friends since sophomore year. When she asks me if I want any, I reply: “Is the pope catholic?” And then I start salivating.
• Exchanging cat stories. I am a cat person. And by cat person, I mean a person who will let their cat wake them up at four in the morning because it wants to be petted. I get together with my friends and coo over how our cats are all such spoiled princesses. This lets all the cat adoration out of my system and keeps the strange looks I get to a minimum.
• Sharing perspectives that are different than my own. If the world was homogenous, we would all be very bored. In college I learned that, thankfully, it isn’t.
• Giving me a robe when I get shut out of my room in a towel. This Thursday I locked my keys in my room while I was in the shower. I had work at the diner in twenty minutes. As you probably know, the diner uniform is not a purple bath towel. When I told my family about this episode they thought it was very funny for some reason. Hopefully not schadenfreude.
• Watching Netflix with me on the weekends. This has given me a reason to leave my room and prevented me from turning into a cave person. A cave person can write an elegant fifteen page paper but speaks only in grunts.
• Friends are the people you can reveal vulnerability too. When I revealed some of mine, one of my friends said that she was honored that I’d chosen to confide in her. I was very touched.

I hope that whomever’s reading this, you have friends as nice as mine.