This semester, Student Government messed up, and much of the student body threw them under the bus, seemingly forgetting one important thing: They’re students.

Just like the rest of us, they have classes to attend, professors to please and papers to write.

And as much as we all wish, we’re not at college to pass legislation, write for The Daily Reveille, work for Volunteer LSU, play for a club sport or party on the weekends — which starts Thursday if you can get away with it.

We’re also here for class, though we often forget, as evidenced by the enraged email communication studies professor Loretta Pecchioni sent to one of her low-attendance courses.

But as we straggle into exams this week, blue books and No. 2 pencils in hand — some of us for the last time before graduation and entrance into the working world — it won’t be our favorite professors or course material we’re thinking about.

It’ll be the night you stole a Bud Light sign from Boudreaux & Thibodeaux’s, the day you woke up at 4 a.m. to get ready for the football game or that one time your roommate decided to adopt a cat without your knowledge.

And you loved it. All of it.

That’s what college is about. It’s about accidental caffeine withdrawals after midterms week, the desperate calls from Tigerland and the research project unrelated to what you thought you wanted to do with your life that you lucked into by actually going to a professor’s office hours.

Sure, we’re here for a piece of paper that apparently qualifies us for a job, but we’re also on this campus to learn how to grow up — which, according to certain parents, doesn’t include learning to wash clothes by Febreezing them or regularly forgetting about extra study sessions because the weather is perfect.

By this point, I’m sure any parent reading this is appalled.

“I sent my baby to school to learn,” they cry. “I’m paying too much money for them to waste it like this.”

It’d be a waste if you attended some crazy-expensive school up in the Northeast, but we don’t. We’re down here in the “Dirty South” and by damn, we’ll live it up and take all the cultural advantage of it that we can.

We’ll spend the weekend before finals at Jazz Fest, and the weekend before that at Festival International.

We’ll spend summer planning S.T.R.I.P.E.S. and running any number of campus events or being a summer RA and calling LSU Police Department for false alarms that cause the incident report to read like something that was written by a confused schizophrenic.

And we’ll probably learn more about real-world situations from things that happen by accident.

When was the last time you sat in class thinking, “Wow, I’ll definitely need to know this exact information in about 10 years”?

Now how about that sorority meeting when you realized you needed 15 points to be in good standing for Formal and immediately began working contacts to find volunteer hours?

Or that Tuesday you had to bail your fellow Tiger Band member out of jail?

That taught you something.

So SG botched the elections. They’re not perfect. They don’t have it all figured out.

But they probably learned something from holding two elections and getting called out about spending habits. And that’s the point.

They’ve got one more thing figured out, and so do you, probably.

I’m sure there’s someone out there who remembers how to conjugate “estar” in the future perfect, to solve some equation from biology that will help during Jeopardy marathons.

But more importantly, you’ve learned drinking tequila is the worst idea in the world, sleep is more important than studying and drunk showering is an acrobatic art.

Love purple, live gold, y’all.

Megan Dunbar is a 19-year-old English junior from Greenville, S.C.