Drew Magary, the normally crass and sarcastic contributing editor at Deadspin, writes a great piece about transferring colleges:

I remember being very happy to get out into the wider world, a world I had absolutely no expectations for, and a world that didn’t give a shit who I was or what school I had transferred from. I remember the only good times I had in during college were when I was far away from college, in New York or elsewhere. And the reason why is because I probably didn’t expect anything of those other places, the way I did college. I didn’t have some goddamn asshole 1980s [movie] fever dream about what those places would be like. You spend so much of your youth trying to achieve the dream version of yourself instead of just accepting yourself for your faults and moving on. Finding your niche. Not bothering to make friends with people who don’t really want to be friends with you. I wish I had realized that before college, but I didn’t. Sometimes, shit just happens that way.

As a college transfer myself, I can relate. I had very specific expectations going into freshman year and those expectations turned out to be crippling to my development as a college student. I was going to make a ton of friends the first week and join a frat and meet a bunch of girls and so on and so forth. When none of those things happened, I withered.

I don’t regret being unhappy at my first school. I didn’t fit in and would be equally if not more unhappy there now. I do, however, regret having a picture of what I wanted before I got there. If there’s anything I’ve learned from school this year it’s that normal and conventional isn’t always good. Everyone has their quirks and variances. The same goes to their experiences in college. The people who have what I dreamed of before college are probably having a lot of fun, and more power to them. But me, I’d rather have a little bit of flavor, an experience that isn’t so conventional. I think in the end I’ll be better for it.