Finishing school, starting college, maybe leaving for an altogether new place, the friends, the hangouts, the familiar roads-letting go is tough. Awww...

By Ambica Sharma

No! Don't feel lost and confused. It had to happen to you one day, so it has. School life is almost over and the only way to cope with the hurting part of it is to keep in touch with your friends through the phone and meeting them whenever you find the time. In the beginning, when you still have to make new friends in college, you'll be wanting to run to your old friends. Try not to do that, give yourself time and a chance to the new people you meet. It's very easy to stay embedded in the past.

When you are feeling too nostalgic about school in college, go to school! Go meet your teachers, sit outside the school canteen and have a sandwich. If you have a younger sibling in the same school-all the more reason to visit your school. This will hold back the uprooted feeling for about a week. It still hurts? Then make another trip to school!

Everyone has some kind of memorabilia from school-a t-shirt with the school name on it, your school socks (even if you never wore them in school, now you will!), your old half-finished school notebook-use it to note down the first timetable you get in college. In fact, take the things you used or had in school with you to college. You'll hang on to them for some time and then, as you get busy with your new life, you'll stop wanting to go back so much.

If you can, introduce your school friends to the new ones you make in college. This way when you talk about your school and your friends there, your college friends will know what and who you are talking about and you won't end up feeling all that lost.

One of the best ways to get school out of your system or for that matter to get anything out of your system, is to talk about it. So, yakkety yak about school till your jaws or the ears of the people around you, ache. Either way, you won't talk about it after a few days!

Go to your friends' colleges and spend a day with them. You'll realize that now, you really do need to leave your school behind and get on with your life in college. If you have shifted to a new place to attend college-then you may have a real tough time, with a new city, college and people. You have to be tougher and not dwell on the shift till the hurt subsides.

You know leaving school will also separate the friendships that are going to last for the rest of your life, from the ones that were supposed to last only till the end of school. Now is the time you'll come to know whether your best friend was your friend, or was in direct cut-throat competition with you (both in studies and the attentions of the opposite sex), during school time. People who were just acquaintances during school will become good friends. And you'll wonder why you were such casual friends in school!

Bridging the gap between school and college will require an analytical approach. You'll see that you have been taken in by the mass hysteria about leaving school-'we are leaving all this behind, all this where we have spent the best years of our lives'. Leaving, leaving, leaving? No, you are moving on. The scene is like so screwed up that on the last day you are hugging people who you couldn't pass by in school without grabbing hold of their collar and hissing a few choice phrases!

So you wanna get over school? Here is one more way. Remember so and so's gf? Go make friends with her and you'll come to know the truth about who actually liked whom but was going around with whom. And who had actually caused the fight between 12 D and 12 F and who had actually received flak for it. Now when you know the reality of things, it will definitely be easier to get over school and put things into perspective.

Start reading the school newsletter. Yes, now after so many years, you will feel like reading it. Remember how in school we used to make paper planes and see them sail out of the window and into the hair of the physics teacher or the school prefect? Read the newsletter and let the present editorial board know how well they are doing their job and how much you still like to read it.

This one will not have to be done specifically because it is ingrained to a certain extent in every school-going kid. What are we talking about? Writing neatly and drawing lines at the end of each topic written. And it goes without saying that those of you who did not make any notes in school will have to do so in college-see, it is all because you are missing school.

Cheer up! And chin up! It is not all that bad leaving school-think about it. You will go through this same feeling when you leave college. This means that you are going to have a blast in college too. You don't want to drain your reservoir of weepy feelings right now, you are gonna need them again-three years later! ¨

For people who are like, diehard fans of school life, you are the ones who when asked whether you prefer school or college life, will invariably answer 'school.' Well, you people can deliberately start up a debate on which school is better yours or theirs (rest assured this debate will soon turn into a full-fledged argument) and you can go home with a feeling of having defended your school to the best of your ability.

Here's one more for diehard school fans. Although college doesn't start as early as school, get up as early as you did when you had to catch the school bus. This one will surely make you forget the difference between going to school and going to college.

The other thing that can be done to get rid of the bothersome feeling about leaving school is to not think about it. Don't contact any of your friends, don't go visit your school and absolutely try not to think about school. Don't say- Whaaat?! You want to get on with your life or not? Don't live in the past. Once you've firmly established yourself in college look up your old friends.

Attend all your classes in college. Don't give me another Whaaat?! You wanna get over your school fixation or not? If you were the one who spent all your time in school on the field, then do that in college too. Of course, you will have to attend classes sometimes, even if it is just to become familiar with your classmates so that you can borrow notes from them at the end of the year.