It's been nine years since I was where you are now. I remember being as nervous about it as you. But also excited. Are you going to college far away from home? I went to school in another state, hundreds of miles away; a sixteen-hour journey by car.

Are you the only person worrying about college before it starts? Absolutely not. There probably are those who go with no qualms, but I would imagine they're a minority. You said all your friends "seem so calm." "Seem" is a key word there. I bet they're anxious too; they may simply show it differently, or not show it at all.

Buying textbooks? If your college is anything like mine was, you don't need to worry about books yet. When I went to college, I didn't even find out what books I needed to buy until after I registered for my classes after arriving at school. If you've already registered by mail for your classes and have a textbook list though, it wouldn't hurt to start looking. You can save a lot of money by getting used books. And $750 sounds to me like more than enough, but then I have no idea what you're majoring in or what classes you'll be taking and how expensive the texts tend to be. Still, if you're going to a liberal arts college, you'll find that freshman tend to all take the same classes, so your experience will, at least this first year, probably be somewhat similar to mine.

Worried about clothing space? There are ways to compensate for that. You could get some of those slide-under-your-bed bins to hold some of them, or an easy-to-assemble clothing rack for stuff that needs to be hung.

I think you're overly anxious about the whole responsibility-and-adulthood thing. For me, college was a transitional time of life. Yes, I was "on my own," away from my parents and family for the first time in my life, and I did have to take more responsibility for myself, but I didn't feel like I had arrived at adulthood yet either. College is another life-step in preparation for independent adulthood, or at least I think that's how it should be.

The questions you ask about college are hard to answer, because every school is different. They're in different places, they have different faculties and staffs, different student bodies, different facilities, different academic structures, etc. Some colleges have reputations as party schools while others are more well known for being institutions of higher learning. Those things will affect your college experience, but I think college is for the most part what you make it.

Over the four years of college, I had ten different roommates, and there was only one that I disliked. So no, it's not inevitable that you will hate them.

G