I would like to ask such a question my childhood: could you imagine I am flipping very thick English book? Time goes by in a totally different way. It is very fast but sometimes very slow, and now I am super confident that I made a right decision.

Let me talk about what spurred me to come here at first. I was born and grew up in Japan, which is such a tiny isolated island lying 7,000 miles away from theStates.

My high school is a Buddhistt school.

Everything is in Japan and I was truly satisfied being in Japan. However, one thing I regretted was I started studying English very late. It is still one of my most vivid memories when I learned alphabets for the first time in junior high school. At my early stage, I kept writing the word “dog” thousands of times so as not to write as “bog." When I decided to apply to college in the States instead of ones in Japan in my senior year, I had no choice but to face my poor English.

When I started SAT preparation in the middle of senior year in high school, I studied very hard flipping the challenging SAT vocabulary books shrinking my sleeping time. In the daytime, I was obsessed with crumbled English books in a isolated space in high school and a lot of my friends went by with a curious but strange gaze on me. You know what? My high school was very traditional as you can see the picture above. I was the only one applying to colleges in the states among approximately 300 hundred students. Founded more than a hundred years ago, I am probably the first one applying to liberal arts colleges all the way from my school, even if not so, you can count by one hand. Because of that, I was always seized with fear. A lot of Japanese still regard studying outside our own country as a negative decision. In other words, it is an alternative choice when we fail the Japanese college entrance exam. What would happen if I fell behind a very fast intensive class and got into the college where no one of knows Japanese?

However, since I visited here as soon as I got an acceptance letter, Lawrence fascinated me and I fell love in here and I was reassured that here is the place that would make me grow as a person for the next four years. The words came out from the depth of my heart: "Go ahead and try as hard as possible in a given environment, and a lot of people would evaluate me and even though some disrespect for my decision." I realized that what to do in a given environment is more important than what kind of decision I choose.

Now I already spent for almost half a year here. I still suffer from tons of culture shocks. Also, English is still a problem. It is not uncommon that I grieve for my language incapability whenever I cannot equally discuss a serious topic with my friends.

However, every time I face that situation, I never fail to look back when I struggled while making my college decision, and I am steadfast in my believe that it is significant more than anything else to keep challenging and have a lot of shameful experiences. Those experiences are filled with 90 percent of stress and 10 percent of comfort. Now, I am hoping the day that comfort fills my heart.

Finally, I would love to offer appreciation my family that respects my decision and supports me warmly from the other side of the world!

But remember this is just the beginning of my journey.