Having the second half of your spring semester at college ripped out from beneath your feet isn’t ideal, but safety is the most important thing to focus on during this pandemic.

If you’ve been sent home to carry out the rest of this semester online within the comfort of four walls back at the house you grew up in, you’re probably feeling a bit down at this point. No one wants to leave behind the friends who’ve made this whole college thing something to remember.

You’ll see your friends again someday, though, so in the meantime do what you can stay positive! Keep in touch with them, and put up some of the memories you’ve made around your bedroom back home. This is the time to reflect on all the good things in your life. Here are 5 ways to bring your college memories back home with you:

1. Hang up your favorite pictures of you and your best buds

Nothing captures a memory quite like a photo of whatever you’re doing at the time that the memory is being made. Whether you and your friends are out on the town, exploring different restaurants and museums, or you’re all cozied up in somebody’s dorm room, just having conversations about life, those are the moments you want to remember. And you’ve probably got a snap or two somewhere in your camera roll to commemorate those moments.

If you haven’t already, get those photos printed - on regular printer paper for the time being if you don’t live near a place that’s open to print them for you - and get to putting them up around your room. And don’t be afraid to choose unflattering photos! When you stumble across a pic of your best friend pulling a face that makes you laugh, print it out! Laughter is the sign of a good memory, and it’ll help to keep you in good spirits as we ride out the rest of this quarantine.

If you’re someone who appreciates order, you might think about stringing up your photos to hang from your wall or slipping them into some old photo frames. If you don’t mind a bit of chaos, maybe you’ll decide to just paste them up on the walls in random spaces for you to spot as you move around the room. Whatever you choose, it’s sure to be a good way to keep the memories you have of good times spent with your friends alive and well.

2. Make a collage of your favorite memories

Collages always look incredible, and they’re a great way to throw yourself into something as a distraction from everyday life. If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by the influx of negative news coming in by the hour, give yourself some time to step away from it all and focus on the positive things in life. Make a collage that combines snapshots of all of your favorite moments spent at college into one big, serotonin-inducing work of art.

Choose some of the photos that didn’t make the cut to be hung up around your room, and smush them together with other kinds of memories, such as concert tickets or that flier from the first meeting of your favorite club that you’ve joined. Pictures are a big part of what represent your memories, but they aren’t the only thing. Pull together everything that reminds you of something you remember fondly, and make a collage out of it!

If you don’t mind getting a bit messy, you can go for making a classic collage on a sheet of foam or plywood, cutting out your favorite bits of your memories and gluing them to your board of choice. You can even dress it up a little by winding strips of ribbon around your collage to make sure you can hold everything in place. If you prefer things that look a little cleaner, don’t worry!

Another option is to grab a corkboard and pin your favorite memories to it. Maybe it’s considered collage-adjacent, but we won’t tell if you won’t. You can switch out whatever memories you’re remembering the most fondly whenever you’d like. Feel free to periodically move the collage around your room to admire it wherever you find yourself most drawn to.

Or if you aren’t feeling crafty, you can create a photo collage online and have it printed and shipped to your door.

3. Play back some old videos you have of you and your friends

When you’re missing your friends, you might think that what you miss most is their company - and maybe that’s the case. But when it comes down to it, the moment you get to hear your friends’ voices after it’s been way too long since you last spoke to them is one of the greatest feelings in the world. So, while you’re stuck in quarantine, pull up some old videos you’ve taken of your friends and play them back for yourself to reminisce.

You’ve probably got more videos of your friends than you think. At this point, most of us have been around social media enough to know that any Snapchat or Instagram story that’s worth remembering should be saved before you upload it. And if you’re anything like most of the population, you probably haven’t had a good scroll through your camera roll in a while. There are so many memories you’ve forgotten all about that are waiting in there for you.

The next time you find yourself missing your friends, then, open up your camera roll, have a scroll through it, and look out for any videos you have. We’re all inclined to capture moments with the people we love most, so who knows what you’ll find in there. Maybe you’ll get to hear your roommate laugh again, and that’ll be the best medicine. Maybe you can relisten to your friend telling the story of the worst date she ever went on. Hearing their voices will make you feel like you’re right back at school with them.

4. Put notes from your friends in a jar and read one every day

Okay, so maybe you and your friends aren’t the kind of people who slip sappy or funny notes to each other through the cracks at the bottom of your doors. Or maybe you are. Regardless, being able to pluck some of your memories out of a jar at random is a great way to give yourself something to look forward to when you wake up every day. Find little mementos from your friends and collect them all together to give yourself a small treat every day you’re stuck inside.

Even if your friends aren’t the kind of people to pass notes, there’s surely some kind of note from them somewhere that’ll make you smile. If you have a sibling or parent that you trust, have them sort through text messages you have with your various friends to look for sweet or funny messages they’ve sent to you, have them screenshot them, print them out, and fold them up to be put into your jar. Not having the slightest clue of what you’ll draw from the jar adds an extra layer of surprise that you’ll love.

Texts are a nice substitute if they’re all you have access to, but nothing really beats a handwritten note. If you’d like to be able to try this with real notes but don’t know if you have any, take a look through some of your notebooks that you’ve carted around between classes. Every student experiences one moment or another where they completely zone out or begin doodling in the middle of class. See if your friends left any in the margins of your notes!

5. Make a t-shirt blanket out of all of the shirts from clubs you almost joined

When you first came to college, there were a thousand different clubs and organizations for you to consider joining, and you probably wanted to try out at least a tenth of those. Realistically, though, there is no way that you would have had time to manage attending ten of those club meetings regularly. That doesn’t mean you didn’t shop around before you settled into your favorite groups, though.

And what comes with introductory club meetings? Usually a t-shirt! The truth is, though, that if you aren’t an active member of many of those clubs, you’re probably never going to wear those t-shirts again (except maybe to sleep in). Why not put them to better use by cutting them up and turning them all into a t-shirt blanket? There are memories stored in every single one of those t-shirts, and it would be good to look back on them.

Even if you don’t remember everything that went on during that first meeting, try to think back to what you do remember as you’re cutting off the sleeves to the t-shirt. Maybe you sat down next to someone who became a good friend of yours at that meeting. Maybe they just served really memorable refreshments that almost made you wish you had the time to keep showing up to meetings. Regardless, there’s something to remember in each of those t-shirts, and giving them each their own spotlight in a t-shirt blanket is a great way to reminisce on the time you’ve spent at college.

The next time you find yourself missing your friends and all of the memories that you made with them and your classmates while you were at college, think of what you can do to relive those memories for the time being. We’ll all get through this quarantine eventually, but for the time being, it’s best to do everything you can to stay positive.