I loved elementary school, hated middle school and tolerated high school, but I love college.

School has always fascinated me, but school has also been extremely difficult for me, mostly college, because I’m someone who likes to do whatever I want to do, go wherever I want to go, be able to travel, take trips, hang out with friends, go to concerts and live life how life should be lived.

There’s only one thing occasionally stopping that... being in college.

College is in no way hard, in my opinion, or something that is a task to get up in the morning to go do. I love college and all the professors I’ve had or met, and I love everything about college life.

However, I also love living life, and on-campus classes sometimes may get in the way of that. Not that they’re bad, abnormal or stupid. They just don’t necessarily fit my social life.

Sure, that probably sounds awful coming from someone who is in college and who’s article sounds more like they enjoy ‘partying’ than getting a degree. No, none of that.

At the same time, though, my social life includes hanging out with my best friends at six, seven or eight at night and sometimes not even getting home until one, two or three in the morning.

Does that sound like a joyous time when you have an 8 am lecture hall on a Monday morning and your professor doesn’t allow outside drinks besides water?

No, it sounds pretty uncomfortable to me.

My first semester of college I did on-campus classes. I didn’t really know much about online courses nor did I really have any interest in taking them – I don’t think it made sense to me. Little did young Ethan know, he’d soon love them.

I finished up my first semester, passed my classes, met my friends and that was that. Second semester I landed a full-time job, part-time serving job and starting hanging out with my friends more often than not and knew it was going to be what was happening for a decent amount of time.

Not that I think hanging out with friends or doing “YOLO” young-adult activities were more important than classes, but, like I said, I knew I wanted to be able to live life less-worried than not and focus on school at the same time.

You can’t really half-ass journalism courses, in my opinion. Why would I anyway? Literally best major ever, hello.

Realizing this, I signed up for my sophomore semester, did online courses and it was life-changing. You saw a majority of your coursework online, your instructors probably helped you more in-depth if you had questions and you probably worked at your own pace, often times than not, getting ahead so you could not stress so hard each week.

At least that’s what I did.

Online courses and online lecture halls are the best things ever invented in the world of education.

I graduated eight months early from a hybrid, online, independent-study high school after I transferred from my traditional high school. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and from that moment on, transferring in, I realized how much more of an independent, focused, honor-roll student I was.

There were no distractions, kids to talk to from across the room, paper airplanes to throw or teachers to get annoyed at — let’s face it, I was great at that (LOL).

I went to school on Monday, grabbed my packet of work for the week, brought it back on Friday, sometimes even Wednesday or Thursday, took my tests every two weeks and only had to do it about 10 times (10 weeks in a row).

I love college, I love online classes and I love the ability to choose whether or not I can study online or on campus. College is beautiful, education is important and you should feel comfortable enough to choose.

So do it.

Take those classes, go to that community college, go to that university, study online, study on campus. Just do it. Go out there, get your degree and make yourself proud.

Online schooling is a beautiful tool, and I’m happy to say it’s worked in my favor.