This past August, I left my hometown to start my college career at a place where I knew almost no one. As the fifth generation to attend Auburn University, this wasn’t somewhere I was unfamiliar with. I had been coming here for as long as I can remember and had grown up with burnt orange and navy blue running through my veins. I had always loved this place, and it had always been my dream school. So naturally, I thought, as soon as I stepped foot on my new campus as a student, I would find my place and the love affair with college as I had always imagined it would begin. Much to my dismay, that’s not what happened.
I spent the summer asking for advice, shopping for all the dorm essentials and began packing what seemed like my whole life into my car. I finally arrived on campus and slowly joined organizations around campus that I thought would provide me with a well rounded freshman year. I loved my new sorority, really enjoyed my college ministry group and was doing pretty well in my classes, but I started feeling like something was missing. For some reason, I started questioning my choice to go out of state for school and not to a school somewhere closer to home where all of my good friends were.
Soon, the thought of going home almost every weekend got the best of me until I was spending more of my free time driving back and forth than I was at school. As I saw my old high school friends making new friends and having the time of their lives, and after a rough patch with the boy I left behind, I suddenly realized that the problem wasn’t with the school I chose, but instead with how I wasn’t giving my whole self to this new place.
There was no reason I had to hold back from making the same kind of good friends my old friends were making. There was no reason I should be waiting for that boy that eventually decided I wasn’t worth it and, and there definitely was no reason I couldn’t make Auburn feel like home, too. Although it took a few harsh reality checks, I finally woke up and saw everything I had chosen to look beyond before. I got closer to the people around me. I tried new things I had been too scared to do in high school, and I met some really amazing new people. By the middle of November, I caught myself just being happy to be where I was and felt silly for wasting so much time wishing I was somewhere else for so long. I now know Auburn is exactly where I belong.
Now, I face a new challenge as I prepare to leave for an internship this coming semester with the Disney College Program. If you had asked me in October, I could have never guessed that I would be so sad to leave Auburn, the place I now consider home. I’m incredibly excited and lucky to have this opportunity lined up, but I will leave knowing that if Disney is the happiest place on earth, Auburn is a very close second.
