Junior year of high school. Start choosing colleges. Tell all your fiends what your first choice is. Tell yourself that's where you'll be in a year and a half. Joke with your friends about the dumbasses who'll end up in community college. Apply to college. Realize you don't meet the minimum requirements for your first choice. Discreetly stop mentioning it and start telling people your second choice was your first choice all along. Find out the positive aspects of the school – they have a great architecture department – and never shut up about them.

Senior year of high school. Get your acceptance letter and inwardly breathe a sigh of relief. Tell everyone it was never in doubt. Laugh with your friends at people who ended up having to go to their back-up schools. Stop laughing when a friend of yours comes up and says he's going to community college. Try to find nice things to say about community college. Laugh at him with your friends once he leaves. Stop caring about schoolwork. Tell everyone you're “basically already in college.” Disrespect your teachers. Quit clubs. The purpose of high school has disappeared except for socializing. Socialize a lot. Continue to make fun of stupid people. Finally graduate and never shut up about being an adult now, Mom.

Summer after high school. Start wearing a lot of collegiate t-shirts and accessories. You are all but in college, after all. Hang out with your friends at least once a day. Tell your parents you're never going to see your friends again, so that's why you can never be home. Never be home even if you're not with your friends. Home sucks. They don't understand that you're, like, a legal adult now. Flash your voter registration card if you have to. Spend all your graduation money on lattes and headphone and jeans and dinners out with your friends. You're never going to see them again, after all. After you run out of graduation money, beg Mom and Dad for more. Say “I love you” when they finally agree. Exploit their anxiety over your imminent departure as much as possible. Tell your parents you're sleeping over at a friend's house, and go get wasted for the first time in his garage. Have a dunk hook up with that girl that had a crush on you all of last year. Never talk to her again. Drive home at six in the morning before your dad goes to work, despite still being drunk.

Go to orientation and stay in the dorms. Meet people as fast as you can because you're afraid of being a loser. Luckily, everyone else is afraid of the same thing so you meet people quickly. Sit around in someone's dorm room and talk about how grown-up you feel. Half-heartedly participate in the school spirit activities and wonder if you'll ever be as enthusiastic as everyone else. On the way back to your dorm after a diversity-awareness meeting, get beckoned over by a shady-looking sitting on the one of the campus benches. Accept his offer to smoke weed and get high for the first time. Wander around campus trying to find your dorm for a while, and get led back by a campus cop. Almost wet yourself with fear of what your parents would do if the cop caught you and they found out you smoked pot. They might even stop paying for your college. Go home and tell everyone your drugs story with a laugh, the embarrassing bits neatly excised.

When the end of the summer comes, start to feel sad about all your friends going off the different colleges. Pack all your things into boxes for the dorm. Fill the family van and car with your crap. Tell your dad he's being annoying when he says he didn't bring anywhere near that much stuff when he went off to college.

Drive up to the dorm and feel impossibly embarrassed by your family and their minivan. Lug your stuff up the stairs and awkwardly meet your roommate and his family. Suddenly worry that he's judging you by your stuff. You know he must be, because you're judging him. His taste in music is horrible, for example. He has a blink-182 poster. Try to unpack your stuff, but realize you can only fit half of it. Lug the other half back down to the van. Your roommate got the better bed. Resent him the rest of the year for it. Be glad to be rid of your family at least as the van pulls away carrying your crying mother.

Start meeting people on your floor. Bond over the pretentious pseudo-intellectual posters you have in common, like that one with the Gandhi quote and that one with Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out. Also bond over how weird your roommate is behind his back. Thankfully he's always at his girlfriend's dorm. Start eating with your friends at the dining hall and try to impress each other with how healthy you can eat. Learn to like arugula by necessity. Eat chicken fried steak when your new friends aren't around. Start class and gradually get used to calling your teachers “professor.” Brag to your friends about how cool your “profs” are. Your wrote the textbook for your class. Be secretly jealous of your friend whose professor worked at CERN. Get accustomed to asking people their major and where they're from along with name and age. Painfully endure saying “undecided” every time you're asked. At lunch with your friends, spend most of your time coming up with new ways to say that college is better than high school. Get excited with your friends because you plan to go party downtown at bars and clubs. End up wandering around the streets, stone cold sober, all Friday nigh because you're too young to get into any bars and no one knew of any parties. Drink in someone's dorm on Saturday nigh instead and throw up in the dorm's communal bathroom because you and your friends were trying to see who could hold the most liquor. Become obsessed with alcohol, and fancy yourself well-informed on the topic after a university-mandated alcohol safety information course and several experiences with cheap vodka, whiskey, and Keystone Light. Realize to your delight that complaining about Keystone Light is always a viable conversation topic at parties. Wake up one Sunday morning in a larger girl's bed who you don't recognize and slip out quietly. Notice later a new contact, “fat girl,” in your phone and pray the two are unrelated as you delete the number.

Finally run out of clothes and do your own laundry for the first time. Have to ask your RA if your sky blue underwear is a “light” or a “dark.” Take to saying that laundry is your least favorite thing about college – it is. Spend Sunday evenings recovering from hangovers and writing three-page, double-spaced papers with titles like “Why History Is Important” at the absolute last moment because they are so hard. Joke later with your friends about how easy college is. Say: “It's just getting drunk and writing papers.” Actually write a paper while drunk once or twice and post about it on Facebook to show everyone how much fun you're having at college. Make sure to quote Asher Roth's “I Love College.” Get an email from a friend from home and realize you don't miss your high school friends.

Have your fantasy of easy college life shattered when your professors mention your mid-terms next week. Spend the week catching up on the reading you didn't do and continually post about how “hard college is” on Facebook. As soon as midterms are over start planning your Halloween costume – you have plans to go to a frat party for Halloween. Dress up as the lead from last summer's blockbuster. Joke with your guy friends about how Halloween is that one day girls can all dress up like sluts without being called sluts. Go to to the party and get your ego inflated by all the compliments you get on your costume. Meet a girl playing flip cup with black and orange cups and end up hooking up with her. Start hooking up with her regularly and tell people she's your “friend with benefits,” Inwardly feel smug that you are able to say that.

Go to a home football game and suddenly realize you had school spirit all along. Go team! Remember, your football team is the best anywhere and anything the other team does is morally wrong. Without actually knowing how, laugh as your team crushes the pathetic team from... wherever they're from again.

Reluctantly go home for Thanksgiving and make a big show of how mature and impressive you are now. Steer your family's conversation toward intellectual topics so you can name-drop names like Foucault, Engels, or Hegel that you just learned last month. Belittle and patronize your younger siblings and cousins still not out of high school by saying things like “When I was your age,” or, “One day you'll understand.”

Satisfied you've sufficiently shown off to your family, return to school and start getting ready for finals. Start studying for finals with your friend with benefits as well as fucking her. Eventually become her boyfriend. Pass your finals (with the curve) and head home for Christmas.

Patiently endure your weeks at home as your mother does your laundry and makes you meals you shirk in favor of going out to eat with your parents' money. See your friends and have a pissing contest over who had the best college experience. Conclude it was you despite your jealousy about that foam party story and the acid story and the stripper story. Tell everyone how much you missed them. When Christmas comes complain that your parents got you the wrong kind of laptop, but show it off to your friends anyway. Get so drunk at New Years' that you don't remember midnight happening the next morning.

Back at school, impress yourself with how smart you sound and start talking about things like “power structures” and “phonemes” and “dependency theory” and “self-actualization.” Finally decide on a major – anthropology. When people ask you why you made that choice, just shrug your shoulders. You don't know. If they ask what career path that is, shrug again.

As you scramble to find a roommate for next year, realize you only actually like one of your friends. Room with him. Next year, hate him because he's such a slob.

Over the summer, do an internship with a political campaign. Find out who the person you're working for is using Wikipedia. Refer to him by his first name around your friends, despite never having met him. Break up with your girlfriend because she's boring now. Gain weight off ice cream and fried food and tell yourself sitting by the pool counts as exercise.

Next year, make fancy dishes in your friend's apartment with Italian names you can't pronounce but think you can. Illegally drink wine and laugh and be pseudo-intellectual and feel cultured. Talk about freshmen who are presently getting a “cheap drunk” off of cheap whiskey and cheap vodka and Keystone Light and wonder how they can stomach the stuff. Toast everyone's good health and superiority with your eight-dollar-a-bottle rose wine. Make sure to mention how well the food complements the wine.

Continue to tend to your image. Wear scarves and fitted clothing and ironic t-shirts. Tell your family how “plebeian” they are. Go to outdoor concerts and smoke pot. Run from the cops. Go broke eating out and buying wine with your fake ID and go hoarse discussing literature with your friends that no one will admit they didn't read.

Study abroad your junior year in Spain. Hook up with a foreign girl and immediately text your friends about it so that they know how cool you are. Laugh with your new American friends in Spain about how ignorant and ethnocentric all the Americans back home are. Continue to skip Spanish class and rely on English-speaking Spaniards. Spend every weekend traveling around Europe by train spending your parents' money converted into euros.

When you get back start looking at graduate schools and start the whole process over again. Never consider how little you've changed.