In nature, once a baby bird is old enough he must leave the nest and spread his wings. Humans, for the most part, do the same (albeit, without actual wings or the threat of falling to our deaths) if we're not ready. We do, however, all leave home at some point. Some people go into the military, some get their own place, some go to a college that's not too far from home, and some leave everything they know to go to college halfway across the country. I am one of those people who left everything they knew to come to a place completely foreign to them.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Less than three months after graduating high school, I packed up all my stuff and started fresh at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. LA and Des Moines couldn't possibly be any more different from each other tan they already are. LA is the second biggest city in the United States with a population of over 3 million, Des Moines has a population of just over 200,000. While Des Moines itself does okay in terms of diversity, Los Angeles is one of the most diverse cities in the world. LA is right by the coast, Des Moines is landlocked. You get the picture, I might as well have been going to a different planet. As such, the most often question I hear when I tell people where I'm from is "Why Grand View? Why Des Moines? Why Iowa?"
The reasoning behind me coming to Des Moines was simple, I wanted to see something new, I wanted to be independent. I knew I wasn't going to be able to do that if I went to college in the area that I was already so familiar with. My only chance to truly become my own person would have been to go far away from home. That's where Grand View came into the picture.
That was my reasoning when I first got here. I didn't know what to expect from Iowa, all I knew was that there was a lot of white people and the winters were cold. However, shortly after moving in, I met some of the most genuine and amazing people that I've ever come to know. Knudsen Hall has a reputation for being the stereotypical run-down freshman dorm, which it is, for the most part, however it really provided me and many other students living there with great opportunities to get to know each other. Throughout the school year, we all became close to one another and were basically family. Grand View had become a second home for me, and leaving school for the summer at the end of April became just as hard for me as leaving home at the beginning of August.
I wrote this to answer the frequently asked question that I don't feel like answering every single week, but also for anybody in the same position that I was. If you're considering leaving home for college, do it. It will be one of the best decisions you'll ever make
