When I try to think back over the past few years, I sometimes feel like I only got half the experience of college life. My college career began four years ago, but in my mind, college didn't really begin until my junior year.

See, I spent my first two years going to Penn State-Behrend up north in Erie. I'm originally from Erie, so while I lived on campus, I usually came home every weekend and didn't really get the complete college experience in those freshman and sophomore years.

Don't get me wrong, though, I definitely have some great memories from those years at Behrend. Most of my time was taken up either playing for the tennis team or working for the student newspaper.

Our tennis team was a bizarre combination of guys who made the term "student-athlete" sound like a gross exaggeration. We spent way more time getting into trouble than playing matches, and our No. 1 player was hung over three-fourths of the time. It was a great group, though, and those guys have been some of my best friends over the past four years. Somehow we also managed to win a conference championship my sophomore year and, in typical fashion for us, we celebrated the victory with a trip later that night to the local strip club.

I was also on the student newspaper at Behrend and got to experience the joy of getting into screaming matches with my co-editor each week while trying to produce a weekly newspaper in an office that was slightly smaller than the average freshman dorm room in East Halls.

After my sophomore year, I'd had enough of fighting claustrophobia in the Behrend Beacon offices and decided to head down to Happy Valley and see if I wasn't eaten alive by a school of 40,000 people.

The first few weeks down here were definitely tough as I tried to adjust to the size of this place and not get on to the wrong bus every day. Fortunately, I transferred down here with a lot of friends from Behrend, making the transition much easier.

I'll jump on the bandwagon and say that the football games from this past season have provided a large chunk of those great memories. I may get hazy on the details from the Ohio State game in the years to come, but I know that I'll never forget the surreal experience of tailgating before the game and walking downtown afterwards. Walking down Beaver Avenue as thousands of people lined the sidewalks and hundreds more cheered from their apartment windows, I realized I was witnessing something I would be describing for years to come.

Traveling to Miami to see the Orange Bowl, a.k.a. The Game that Wouldn't End, is also definitely ingrained in my memory. I'm still laughing as I think about my friend who slumped back in his seat between one of the overtimes and screamed down at the field to no one in particular, "Will someone win this f****** game? I want to go to bed!"

A part of me agreed with him, but a bigger part didn't want it to end because I knew I would probably never see anything like it again.

Transferring to a school of 40,000 from one that is a tenth of that size can be intimidating, and I would advise any future student here to make sure they find a niche, somewhere they can fit in. I was lucky enough to get that working at the Collegian, though I didn't truly feel like I was a part of the staff until this semester when I became one of the night sports editors.

For me, joining night desk was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was a mild form of torture as I spent nights trying to come up with one-column headlines for men's lacrosse and spent so much money parking my car in the Beaver Parking Garage each night that if I were to think about the total sum I would probably have a stroke.

On the other hand, if I hadn't done night desk, I would've never gotten to know and become friends with the majority of people on the sports staff, a group of people that I know I'm going to keep in contact with for years to come. For that, I suppose I'm willing to live with giving up all that money to a parking garage.

I think that sums up one of the biggest things I've learned over the past four years. Nothing that has happened turned out the way I expected it would, but I also wouldn't change a single thing that happened. When I started at Behrend, I didn't expect to end up down here, but now I can't see myself having not transferred here. I've only had half the time here that most students get, but that's better than none at all, and I'll take that any day.