Growing up not as the only child in a small town outside of State College I knew what it was like to have to share a room and all of your possessions with someone else. I had my own room but I wasn’t spoiled by my parents. I’m glad that I wasn’t an only child because having everything to your self is not all that most people expect it would be. When you’re a kid there’d be no other sibling around the house to play with. I had a brother, but I was also fortunate enough that I was able to make good friends that lived so close because it meant that no matter what I could always find somebody hang out with. As I began high school, the bonds I forged during childhood with the children on my block grew even stronger.

As high school continued I remained very good friends with my childhood friends. When it came down to choosing what colleges we wanted to attend we knew that most of us would go to the same school we at least wanted to be close by so that we could visit each other. I of course wanted to attend Penn State University and most of my friends did as well. A few friends were offered scholarships to other schools on the other sides of the country. They were offers that they could not pass up meaning that we would be all separated on complete opposite sides of the country. Now it’s not like we will never see each other again but having hung out together almost every day in high school and now we would only see each other maybe on holidays was a little disheartening. I was hoping to have really good friends of mine up here at Penn State to make the transition to college life a bit less intimidating but it didn’t work out exactly as I had planned.

However, luckily for me one or two of my good friends were able to attend Penn State and ended up being accepted to main campus. I decided to room together with my one friend for our first year with the hopes that knowing our roommate would really help ease us into our college careers. We requested that we be allowed to room together and then all that was left to do was complete our senior year of high school. However since we were both accepted in November College was still a long way off. But little did I know that during our final year of high school we would grow apart. He had a different group of friends that were not as much into sports as me and a lot of my other friends. Not to say that he was a nerd or anything he just didn’t play the sports that my other friends and I played. He was on the school tennis team and I played football as did a good deal of my friends. Now we never lost our friendship or developed any animosity towards each other, we just didn’t hang out as much as we used to during our earlier years of high school. School ended and we didn’t see much of each other over the summer. We both had jobs and went to Senior week for the summer. I tried to initiate as much social activity between us as possible so that it would not be awkward when we started living together on a permanent basis. He was always happy to come over and hang out or go out to a party. Eventually our friendship returned to the way that it had once been before our final year of high school.

When we finally moved up to Penn State we were both happy to be living together. So far everything has gone smoothly. We both know that we have a roommate that we can trust which really helps your college transition.