If you were to look at my resume, it would take you milliseconds to find the common theme: sports. Championship basketball tournaments, sports photography for minor league baseball, covering high school football for local magazines. Before sophomore year even began, I landed my first internship with the Nashville Predators, a professional hockey team. When spring rolled around, my friends worried about finals but I was engulfed with hockey, working for the NHL during the first and second rounds of the Stanley Cup playoffs as part of a league social media initiative. I was in heaven.

While I can’t attest to other schools, my years at Belmont University has shown the campus to be one of competition. Virtually every student has enormous goals and colossal plans for their future. The result is a constant, unspoken battle that everyone is partaking in. And let me tell you, sophomore year, I was winning. Most majors at Belmont aren’t allowed to intern until junior year, but there I was, a sophomore working with a professional sports team. No one could come close to that. And since status and coolness is now measured in stress and busyness, I was one of the elite.

You see, the classroom has evolved into a competition, dictated by GPAs and test scores. When finals week arrives, the library overflows with students picking up addictions to coffee and Red Bull, cramming for exams so they can come out on top. Higher grades= higher status= better jobs. It’s simple math, and we all know it. In a society where Obsessive Comparison Disorder has infected the vast majority, college students evaluate their worth based on most experience, the best connections, and most impressive internships. I was right in the thick of it.

Junior year, I began a journalism workshop with Belmont’s athletic department. I had full access to all of the athletes and could profile anyone I wanted. It felt pretty good, being the top sports journalism student at a Division I university. But, if I’m being honest, that feeling didn’t last long. Even with all that freedom, I struggled to write. The stories I found were captivating and enticing, but I didn’t want to write them. I wanted something more.

Somewhere in between the triumphant return of a soccer player with a back injury and a cross country runner who tallies 80 miles a week, I realized that life was calling me to find a career with more depth and more substance. Hockey games are an absolute blast, Sunday football is the best part of the week and March Madness is my guilty pleasure, but the world doesn’t need another journalist to cover the NBA Finals or another photographer for the Super Bowl. A lot of reflection during that semester pulled me far away from a career in sports and back to my roots, back to what I’ve always envisioned for my life, before status and classroom competition distracted me.

And that’s my biggest academic accomplishment: the realization that my degree isn’t for me, or even about me; it’s for helping those who are hurting and need a voice.

My major is multimedia production with an emphasis in journalism, which basically equates to video production, photography and writing. All of those are incredibly powerful tools and they can be used to do good in this world, good that is desperately needed in a world riddled with pain. My time in college is preparing me to use those tools and give a voice to those who otherwise have none. My four years of schooling are for more than just a degree, they’re for learning how to best use my skills and talents to have an impact on the world around me, even if it’s a small impact.

Sports are fun, no doubt. But they are not my future. Journalists like Anas Aremeyaw Anas and Janine di Giovanni, that’s who the world needs; that’s who I want to become. Maybe you’re reading this and thinking, ‘That’s not a real accomplishment.’ And maybe it’s not. But I can’t write about my GPA or the scholarships I’ve received or any award I’ve won when my education is about so much more than that. My degree is about what can be done through me to help a world that is hurting, and figuring that out at 20 years old seems like a pretty meaningful accomplishment to me.