Every day is the first day of the rest of your life.

This saying is perhaps most true during college. When you chose to go to college, you made the decision to continue your education because you believe that the skills you will learn here will improve your quality of life. What you did not realize is that those skills won’t just be taught in the classroom.

Every day, students are learning important life lessons and skills that professors just can’t teach. They are learning how to manage their time, handle their finances and behave in social situations. Students are also learning that what they do now affects more than just today.

Students usually don’t realize the importance of their decisions at first. It is perhaps most obvious around graduation. Students begin to realize that they should have paid more attention in technical writing as they write their resumes. They learn that the semester they spent goofing off with friends hurt more than just their grades in a few classes. They learn that the money spent on those pizza dinners could have covered the cost of their GREs.

The connections you make in college are important too. You have to be careful how you treat people. Many students don’t realize how important a good reference is. If you quit your job without warning because you didn’t get along with your boss, then who will give you a reference on your application? Many employers won’t hire someone without a reference. These decisions are important and matter years after you have already forgotten them. Mistakes of our past don’t just go away. They stick around, waiting for someone to find them, bring them up, and ruin your opportunities.

But everyone makes mistakes. If you went out and drank more than you should have, well, everyone’s done it. But if you do it every weekend, it might be time to rethink things. Who do you want to be? What type of person do you want to portray? Who do you need to impress? People say that the only person you need to impress is yourself, that being yourself is enough, and it shouldn’t matter what other people think. But if other people are the ones who decide whether you get a job, get approved for a loan, or continue school, then shouldn’t you worry about their opinions just a little?

We all have a rap sheet that follows us around. For example, one day you could be applying for an apartment and get denied because five years ago, an apartment complex thought you were too rowdy as a tenant and evicted you. Suddenly, you’re on a blacklist. No apartment complex wants you, because you have a mark that says you are a bad tenant. At the time, you thought it was just fun. You were in college, and you liked to party. That landlord was a bad person anyway. But when it comes down to it, no one is going to look at why something is on your rap sheet. They’ll take it at face value and turn you away without any need for explanation.

What we do today shapes us as people, too. The student who went out every night with his friends had different life experiences than the student who stayed home every night. They became two different people. One isn’t necessarily better than the other. It all depends on who you want to be.

So who do you want to be?