Sipping a tall cocktail at the Café last week, bored by the snippets of conversation I could only half catch through the unrelenting vibrations of the band, my eye turned to the dance floor. There I saw a woman I met four years ago and have glimpsed only a few times since.

Four years ago, I was pledging a sorority, as unbelievable as that seems to me now. I remember that she, as I did, bowed out of the cult-like proceedings prematurely, but I don't even recall her name.

As she danced, throwing her head back in laughter, drifting from one skirt-clad accomplice to the next, I couldn't help but wonder where her visit to college life has taken her. And then, fueled by a mix of the funk music, the vodka and the nostalgia-inducing scene before me, my mind began building an oscillating collage of my own journey here. As my graduation date nears, these memories resurface more and more frequently in panicked, entropic thought patterns.

I think about my arrival, at age 18, without a clue of who Joe Paterno was or where to begin in this strange valley. I recall my frustration with my parents, who, because I was on exchange in Germany for my senior year of high school, had in my absence selected the geeky International Languages House as the dorm in which they projected I would like to live. And the disappointment of meeting my roommate, whose first words to me were a dismissive, "I'm not a social person."

I remember all the time I spent smoking cigarettes outside Beaver Hall. If it weren't for the social culture of the little white death traps, I never would have met half of the kids I hung out with that fall semester.

I think back to applying to the Collegian, making it despite my ignorance of JoePa, and then having to repeat the training program because pledging a sorority had distracted me from attending the classes. I recall the wave of panic I felt realizing I only liked one person in the bevy of "sisterhood" I was about to be boxed into. I remember the relief of quitting.

Meeting my future best friend in acting class. Our heads swollen with hangovers, smearing mascara and bright red lipstick over our faces, taping the event and daring each other to go downtown that way. Doing schizophrenic Britney Spears impressions during rush hour in the commons. Moving in together. Fighting.

Returning to Germany for a semester and falling in love with Leipzig. The gray, smoky halls of the university, the utter lack of Americans, the yellow streetcar that took me to and from my apartment every day. I remember studying until my skull threatened to explode and still screwing up my part of a group project. Visiting my old host family and feeling the absence of my host dad, who had died of a heart attack in the meantime.

I remember meeting a guy in the dorms who would become my ex-boyfriend. Being courted by him, appalled by him, carried home by him (well, I don't really remember that). Planning for days what I would wear to pick him up at the airport when he visited in Germany. I remember falling asleep on his shoulder in a train station in Hoboken, and an annoying, drawn out breakup.

I remember getting a job at Crowbar my sophomore year, making $180 in four hours the first night and wrongly expecting that it would ever happen again. Old, drunken alumni and the unbelievably inappropriate things that would come out of their mouths. And running a block to an outdoor Jacuzzi in a bikini early one December morning with my co-workers, two of whom would become some of my greatest friends.

I recall all too well straining to juggle an 18-credit workload, a position at the paper and a 40-hour-a-week job, while at home, my parents divorced and my mother underwent life-threatening surgery. I remember not sleeping. Feeling shattered, sitting in Ritenour after the stress crashed down on me, and holing up in my apartment for nearly an entire semester thereafter. And then slowly emerging from my depressive chrysalis and rediscovering my life.

Landing a magazine internship and sharing the often-excruciating daily commute with a woman who became my mentor and friend somewhere between Connecticut and lower New York. Knowing, for sure, I was going to write for the rest of my life.

One day I know I will think back on my current roommate, who is one of the most magnificent people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. The passion and ardor with which she lives each day, the gorgeous innocence with which she views the world. All the time spent sprawled out on the curvy gray couch, dissecting the world's intricacies, confessing fears, encouraging one another.

The woman dancing at the Café that night began her time here the same as I did, trying to figure out what she wanted out of this place by trial and error. In the meantime, life's innumerable variables have prompted us to approach our days here differently, only to end up once again in the same place. We will each build a bank of singular experiences during our time in this hotel of higher education and emerge with a hell of a lot more than a diploma.

Now, at checkout time, I am only beginning to realize all that I have had here.