To you, my freshman self, I have a great deal of advice to give. These next five years will be some of the most rewarding of your life and will define the path you take going forward.

Yes, I came back in a time machine. Look, I can’t stay for too long, and I have life advice to give, capisce?

No, it won’t take you five years because of time shenanigans, it’s just the plague, now sit down and listen.

You’ve grown a lot through high school: you’ve gone from a lonely, antisocial dork with no friends to a content, somewhat social dork with a few friends. And you know you chose the right place for college. Ever since your prospie hosts entertained you in the dining hall by trying to gargle phonemes that weren’t on the IPA table, you knew that you had found your people.

Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

In the next few years, you will be in close proximity to some of the strangest and most fascinating people you’ll ever meet. Some wear it on their sleeves, while others seem downright ordinary until you gain their trust. They will have very strong and developed opinions about fields you have never before considered entering, and their enthusiasm will sweep you off your feet and make you regret ever doing anything in your life but studying them. You will have knockout, drag-down arguments about whether to one-box or two-box in Newcomb-like problems (one), or whether Dracula is both a vampire and a werewolf (yes) [edit: no].

I hope that got your attention. Because so many of your classmates won’t be like that, and you will come to cherish them anyway. In high school, you looked down on the kids who were more athletic, outdoorsy, and artsy than you. Well, you’re going to meet them here, and they will drag you kicking and screaming out of your comfort zone into new worlds full of wonder. So go into those O-Week activities with enthusiasm. Cherish the days before the upperclassmen get too busy and stop playing Secret Hitler with you in the common room. Go to the first-quarter Hum professor’s 3-hour movie showing and form lasting friendships with the other masochists. Allow a bus ride to spontaneously burst into Tom Lehrer karaoke. When, in the Ryerson basement’s dark corridors, you hear a strange and compelling lecture around the corner, don’t mind your own business: follow it and see what devilry the grad students are getting up to.

Because it won’t always be there. You’ll be halfway through one course you wish could end early and another you wish you could stay in forever, and you and all your classmates will be unceremoniously shipped home. You’ll experience the wonders and joys of an entire university switching to remote classes with all the agility of a one-legged cat (taking a leave of absence through the Zoom year will be the second-best decision you make in your college career).

But you’ll come back older, wiser and with a bit more confidence, ready to take in all you can experience. Accept invitations to a cappella concert afterparties. Attend events for weird political RSOs you’ve never heard of before nor since. Allow yourself to flounder between majors until you become entranced by a class you took by chance. And for the love of God, get involved with your house culture (you’ll have the good luck to be in one of the best); march through the snow while reaffirming your tribal commitment to drink battery acid! Conduct counterespionage to steal back your house’s precious phallic object! The House of Dodd and Mead shall last forevermore!

There will be highs and lows; the friends you meet in impossibly coincidental ways; the roommate whose alarms wake up everyone on the floor but himself; bookstore meet-cutes and reuniting with chance acquaintances years later. You’ll get infected with the plague and quarantined on Stony Island (UChicago’s Elba), and you’ll have to figure out how to code in a command line through a half-delirious fever, but that one fellow inmate who can teach you LaTeX will come to the rescue.

At some point, you’ll make the best decision of your college career, and you won’t even recognize it for weeks afterwards. I’m not going to spoil that one for you, so keep an eye out.

Oh, and make sure to take Professor Schmitz’s Electromagnetics course in your second winter, it’ll put you in the right set of circumstances to steal a time machine two years later.