Your first year of college is very important.

I’m going into my junior year at Columbia University in New York City. Each year has brought different things to look forward to, stirred different emotions, struck different cords – but those most influential originated my freshman year.

In your first year of college…

You’ll learn what it’s like being you. You will have time to ponder things you’ve never dedicated time to think about; you’ll learn what makes you happy and not so happy and why it makes you feel that way. Use this period in college to reflect and self-evaluate about your needs and your wants, and eventually learn which things will never make you happy so you can stop wasting your time looking for them.

You’ll learn what it’s like to be tested. (And not just for STDs. Which you probably should regularly.) You will be forced to stand up for what you believe in… and maybe even sit down for what you don’t. (Use the ‘sitting time’ to listen – a skill too often left out of one’s arsenal.)

You will begin formulating reasons why something is important to you. You don’t have to prove this to anybody, but it helps if you can prove it to yourself. Set time aside to document these ideas, whether digitally (Medium is quite good at this) or in a journal (Muji has really nice journals and pens).

You’ll learn what it’s like to fall in love, be it with a feeling, a subject, or a person; and you will wake up every day thinking about this thing for awhile, getting so excited each morning just to know that it exists; that’s it waiting, for you. Cherish the moments that come out of this relationship; use every minute of your free time to rejoice in this feeling: take photos and back them up on Dropbox, save all of your ideas, or your papers, or your favorite passages from books. (Also, re: backing this stuff up, do it; Dropbox gives free 3GB for college students. You don’t want to ever lose everything because you lost your iPhone at a campus bar or your laptop dies out on you.)

You’ll learn what it’s like to create great memories. Along with the photos you should be saving, create playlists with songs that define your month, your week, your day; save them on Spotify, then come back to them one year later, and every memory and every feeling associated will flood back as if time has collapsed.

You’ll learn how to prioritize. (Hopefully.) Fill your calendar with everything you do – book your classes (#f yeah color coordination), and any time spent doing homework, clubs, exercise, and work (getting some real work experience while in college helps in the long run, by the way). You’ll see how much time you spend on important things, forcing you to use your free time productively. Trust me, you’ll want weekend nights wide open. (Thursday nights, on most college campus, are considered a weekend night.)

You’ll learn when to prioritize. No one has enough time to do everything they want, and everyone only has 24 hours in a day. But there will come a time when a sibling, a friend, a roommate, or a classmate needs your help and your attention (or vice versa), and the English class readings or linguistics homework will just have to wait.

By the time you pack up your dorm (or are helping your best friend pack hers), you’ll just know that, whatever happened, it changed you for good.