When I think back on my first year of college, certain memories glow brighter than the rest. Back then, everything felt so new. All of my current friends were once strangers, and the rush of getting to know them was unlike any other feeling. All of the late-night adventures and Thursday night thrills were once unfamiliar and exciting. Although I cherish those moments of “newness,” I often find myself longing to capture that same feeling in my experiences now as a junior.
While nostalgic moments can remind us to cherish and honor existing memories, they also have the potential to quietly distort the present. By trying to relive the past, we risk overlooking what’s right in front of us, creating a never-ending cycle of dissatisfaction.
Part of the reason those early memories feel so powerful is that they are tied to the novelty of first moving to UT.
College is littered with firsts; moving away from home, making new friends, learning how to navigate a newfound freedom and roaming around your new environment are just a few. Our firsts are what make our college experience feel so exciting.
“That first year of college is to build new experiences. It’s a true novelty … first time being away from home, living amongst people, and then those people become your friends, and (it’s) all new,” said Joseph Dunsmoor, an associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience. “Novelty also has a huge impact on releasing a lot of dopamine from the brain … the brain’s basically saying this is the first time I’ve done this thing, let’s make a memory about it.”
But novelty doesn’t last forever. Over time, what once felt extraordinary could narrow down to a routine, and routines rarely leave the same mark. But while this novelty fades over time into nostalgia, it can serve as a motivator for creating fonder memories. For some, it becomes a spark.
“I feel like it pushed me more to pursue them, because I was chasing that feeling of all the things that I did in high school. So I was like, let me just recreate that here,” biology junior Pearl Patel said. “It was more motivating than holding me back.”
Patel’s perspective shows how nostalgia can act as a compass, pointing us toward what we value and urging us to seek it again. But even then, the challenge is balance: using the past as inspiration without reducing the present to a pale imitation.
But novelty doesn’t last forever. Over time, what once felt extraordinary could narrow down to a routine, and routines rarely leave the same mark.
“By your later years of college, there’s a lot of overlapping experiences,” Dunsmoor added. “You don’t remember them each as distinctly, because … the 100th time you come out with (friends) maybe isn’t going to be quite as memorable.”
Because ultimately, the magic of college was never just in the firsts, it was in being fully present for them. Nostalgia reminds us of what we’ve already lived, but it also allows us to cherish what’s before us, because ultimately, today’s routines could become our most cherished memories.
Huerta is a government junior from Victoria, Texas.
