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<\/a><\/p>\nWhen I first came to Harvard as a fresh freshman, I had no idea if I would find real friends and relationships in college.\u00a0 I was hoping for the best, but that first year of college is pretty socially demanding and hard to navigate, as any college-kid you know can probably confirm, and we were all more concerned with making friends than with keeping them.\u00a0 During those first months of school, everyone had a ton<\/em> of \u201cfriends.\u201d\u00a0 But while we were bouncing between room parties and study groups and sports practices and formals, the substance and mettle of those relationships hadn\u2019t been tested yet.<\/p>\n The last three and a half years have been full of fluctuations for me. \u00a0I studied abroad in Paris last fall, and I felt like a freshman all over again when I came back to campus in the spring.\u00a0 Then there are the natural ebbs and flows of friend-groups; for example, in field hockey off-seasons, I don\u2019t see my teammates nearly as often.\u00a0 Even though most of us long for relational consistency, I think that friend fluxes are a natural (and sometimes inevitable) part of life. \u00a0But on Saturday night, as I looked around at my closest friends, I felt so blessed and full to the brim.\u00a0 To the casual onlooker, I was just shoveling rainbow cake into my mouth, but on the inside, I was thinking: the people in this room are all people I love.<\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019m so grateful I can write that sentence before I graduate, and mean it.<\/p>\n