It’s embarrassing the amount of times I wrote and completed this playlist only to abandon the effort each time and scrap it entirely. I had a version that was soft and reflective and told the story of my college experience over the course of 24 songs. It was a good playlist, but it wasn’t real. Then I had a version – in true Hourz O’ Power fashion – that was 24 songs of nothing but heavy. That was a good playlist too, but it felt too unified to represent how college really was for me.  I’ve gone through so many other iterations of what this could’ve been that it took me until today – just two days before these playlists are due – to see clearly what it should be: A little bit of everything.

I spent my first year of college behind a computer screen at home in California amping myself up for how exciting “real” college was going to be. Then I landed here in fall of 2021 ready to face the world. The world faced me right back and I quickly realized I was the most alone I had ever been. I didn’t know anyone — I barely even knew myself. Then I found Impact 89FM — I found my people — and spent the next three years doing the typical college thing: making friends, making mistakes and listening to people I didn’t like tell me who I was supposed to be. 

I don’t have a witty or poetic anecdote to sum up my college experience because if I can’t talk about all of it, I don’t want to talk about any of it. Every experience over the last three years feels like part of a whole, and that whole is joyous, furious, pleasant, agonizing and a whole host of other contradictory adjectives. I’ve found myself getting trapped in contractions lately. I can’t wait to enter the real world, but I don’t want college to end. I can’t wait to meet the people in my future who will change my life, but I don’t want to leave my friends here who have already done that. The list goes on.

If I was forced to say that college was only one thing, I would say it was real. I can see every single day of the last three years on my skin, in my eyes and in the way I talk. I am a changed man. What changed about me? A little bit of everything.