The Goodbye Part.

To my dearly beloved GDub community,

Well, don't I have to start out with a massive apology?! I have left you all completely factoid-less for months now! I greatly apologize for my absence, but I got myself VERY caught up in the GW world and then trying to extricate myself from it for the summer. The good news? Since I've been a bit AWOL, there are tons of things I can write to you all about, so PLEASE keep checking back - the updates will be frequent here on out (seriously, though)!

I write to you now from my childhood bedroom on my last night at home before I'm back to the district. For anyone who knows me, it will come as no surprise that I am feeling disgustingly sentimental, as I always am at pivotal moments such as these. I feel like all of it should be eerily familiar, with the echoes of one year ago in the same rushed-hugs, spit-up goodbyes, loaded cars and tears on the driveway. But somehow, I feel not as if I am just going back to college once again, but that I am going home.

This is what I can tell you, and it is probably the best advice I can give anyone, as I'm sure you read this amidst breaks from stuffing your minivans or stocking the fridge in your dorm room. It is more important than talking to you about admissions or my summer job or how to get involved on campus. College is the first brand new world you get, and you never get to relive stepping into it twice. I won't give the "appreciate it, it goes too fast" sermon, as I know every friend, relative and estranged middle school friends' parents have told you. But truly, it is all very fleeting and this is the moment where you get to create your own new world. It's terrifying, it makes your stomach curl, makes you feel bile in your throat, but it is exhilarating and pulsing and like ripping off old skin. There is no other freshman year, and you can take that truth from me.

But, I digress - I do not aim to depress. Yes, you only get to be a freshman once, and while I encourage with all of my being that you live it the way you always wanted to live your old life, there is something to look forward to: being a sophomore. And I mean that. Because here I am, after a year that changed my life, and I truly feel like I am going home. I have a best friend as a roommate and a beautiful dorm-apartment to make my own, I live in the epicenter of Foggy Bottom like I had daydreamed of all through my freshman year, I am on the board of the theatre company that welcomed me with open arms, I have rehearsals this weekend and reunions with my college friends at night, I have an interview Monday for my dream internship along with my first slew of classes and gym routine, all amongst going back to talking to you all from behind my computer screen or walking backwards through campus. I have made for myself the most inexplicably perfected brand new world, and the only thing better than building it is now coming home to it.

As always, I am here, new freshmen, prospective ones as well, or the rest of the GDub community, so I give you my ears: write me at gmdepalo@gwmail.gwu.edu. To all the prospectives-turned-colonials I will be welcoming onto campus this weekend, we are so happy you've joined us.

Thank you GW for all I have gotten.

See you around campus,
Gina Michele