After a long day at orientation all of the students went to the rooftop deck of a bar. Second-year mentors were supposed to meet and bond with first-year mentees. My mentor is still at her internship in New York until this weekend, so for three hours I circled around and drank and talked and learned and forgot a hundred names and a hundred faces.

It’s been hard to get a grasp of what it’s like here. Three out of four comments use words like “brutal” and phrases like “ripped apart” and “a shell of your former self” and the fourth gives you a half-hearted “oh, you’ll be fine.” Finally, a second-year AD sees the waves of anxiety running through me and another girl in my track and he introduces us to a second-year who sits us down and gives us a drunken run-down of exactly what we’re heading into.

It’s all blurred together now but I remember bits like: it’s going to be tough, because of course. We’re not going to sleep, because why would we. We’re going to fail and be humiliated and cry in class sometimes, because this will make us better. We’re here because not only do we love something, we love it enough to want to be the very best at it, and we’re at the best place in the world to learn it. It’s going to hurt a whole lot and it’s going to be incredible.

And I feel so much fucking better.