It's going to be hard to see with much light pollution, and it certainly won't look like what you see in pictures. Under your average surburban sky (Bortle 4-5), it'll look like faint smudge with averted vision.

Recommendation would be to use binoculars - you'll know you found it if you see a bright spot with a halo around it, kind of like an out-of-focus star: that's the galactic center. You're unlikely to see any spiral features without a larger telescope and without long-exposure photography.

Andromeda's apparent magnitude of 3.4 is deceiving because that's the overall integration of _all_ light across an area 6 times bigger than the moon. Its surface brightness outside of the galactic center is pretty dim. That's why it's much, much easier to see a star with a comparable apparent magnitude, since the star is essentially a point.