Transitioning to college, one difficult idea that I had to wrap my head around was the fact that age does not matter as much here as it did during the previous 12 years of school. Since arriving on grounds, the number of times I have been told not to worry about something because ‘age doesn’t matter as much now’… I lost count a long time ago.

Towards the end of my senior year of high school, I began to think about taking a gap year, which is when I first started became attuned to the possibility of what I call the ‘age label.’ Considering taking the year off, I began to worry about being an outlier compared to my potential college peers. My high-school wired brain warned in big red letters that I would be a whole entire year older than all of my classmates when I actually started college.

Coming from generally small homogenous schools, in primary and secondary school I unconsciously and incorrectly associated a stigma towards older students, who may have repeated a year or a started their education later. Now as a student older than then most of my classmates, I understand the ignorance of my youthful mindset. There are so many variables, that can affect one’s path of educational.

Life can present opportunistic detours or unexpected obstacles. In my case, I had the opportunity to take a year to engage in a different kind of learning, outside of the traditional classroom.

Both here at UVA and in college classes around the country there is an immense level of age diversity. Take for instance the guy that lives two floors down from me who took two gap years to focus on athletics. Or the genius who might have skipped a couple of grades and looks way too young to be walking down Rugby Road on Saturday night.

After all, we do have one thing in common: none of us have been to college before.

Having taken a year off to work and travel abroad on my own, having lived away from home for five years prior to college, and being a year older than the average first year, I don’t feel that much different from my peers. I face the same challenges that they do: adapt to the academic rigor of college-level classes and meeting new people while acclimating to a new environment (not to mention having to apply and be accepted to anything and everything here that sounds even slightly intriguing).

The age label does not exist in college, let alone the real world. It is simply a fearmongering device used by high school seniors to make themselves feel more powerful by body slamming fresh meat into cold metal lockers. Zero constructive application. Learning this has inspired me to branch out and make connections outside of my first-year class, join a novice varsity sport, and apply to become a writer for Odyssey.