I was always a small-town girl. I grew up in rural suburbs outside the city and going into town was always an exciting trip to see something besides the acres of grass, corn, and cows that I was accustomed to seeing in my hometown.
While I love my home, and it's always refreshing to go back to my hometown, when I came to school in the city, my life forever changed, in the absolute best way possible. I couldn't be happier to have become a city girl, and there are a lot of reasons why. Being a student in a big city offers you a ton of opportunities that you would never have otherwise.
1. Being in a city forces you to expand yourself. As a person who came from a small town, a small high school (and before I transferred to my school, a small college), it's easy to fall into a routine where you're super comfortable. You know your environment, you know all the people, you know what you can (and can't) get away with. Being in the city doesn't allow you to be comfortable all the time. You need to learn how to navigate, like taking public transportation and what streets come after one another. You need to learn where it's okay to walk alone if you need to, and where the coffee is great (or where it sucks) because there are a million different things that you don't know and a million other people around. To survive here, you need to branch out and be independent--until you make some city friends, there's no one that can tell you how to do it (the internet just doesn't count).
2. You get the opportunity to meet a lot of different people. In my hometown, everyone looked the same--we were all the same ethnicity, and at my Catholic school, we had the same religion, same economic status, and same lives basically. That's not how it works in the city. People say it jokingly, but cities are melting pots of different cultures and different people with different values. Now, when I walk into a classroom, I'm surrounded by people I never would've crossed in my old life--people studying abroad from other countries, who grew up across the nation, who have different beliefs than I do, who don't share anything in common with me--and that makes life interesting.
3. You get to do things other students don't. Remember that time you read that one book you really liked or found that one science concept really interesting? If you were in the suburbs, it wouldn't be that easy to take a trip to the museum that's right around the corner that talks all about your favorite discipline, or head to the Edgar Allan Poe house after you decided he was your favorite author. Being a city student enhances your ability to study because you can do that stuff, whenever it's convenient.
4. You can never get bored. In your small town, there were limited options for what you could do for fun. Football games here and there, and maybe a trip to Dairy Queen afterwards (there was nothing else in town)--sometimes a movie, but you had to drive 25 minutes to get there. You don't have that problem in the city. You can go into the center of town to have a nice dinner, there's a pizza place or a Starbucks on every corner, a movie theater within walking distance from your apartment, not to count the museums and parks and cultural events like theater shows you can catch on any given day or night. You really can find something to do, no matter what time of day.
5. Nothing is ever the same. The negative is that next year, your favorite small coffee shop might already be replaced with a new one, but the world is constantly changing here, and you can see it. Next year, a brand new building could be up across the street from where you live because there's always construction going on. If you love change, be in a city. You won't be disappointed.
Small towns are great, and I won't lie, sometimes I miss mine. A lot. But if you're anything like me, you crave something more--more exciting, more alive, more diverse--and now that I've found it, I don't ever want to go back. I have never felt more alive, more independent, and more accomplished.
