Coming into college, the main things that I was thinking about were what I would decide to major in and what my future job could possibly be. After just a couple months of spending way too much time with my nose in a book, I have come to realize the real reason that I decided to attend university, besides just receiving an education that leads to a fancy degree of some sort: to find myself.

It is recognized that a college degree is an amazing accomplishment for students to receive upon graduation. Besides this degree, there are so many more lessons that I hope college can teach me that goes along with figuring out who I am as a person. First, I want college to teach me to how to finally love myself and to love those around me. It's not like I don't love myself; I do, just not all of the time. I want to be able to stop comparing myself to the thousands of other people around me and to realize that I am completely unique in my own way. I want to be able to find myself within the large crowds and to differentiate who I am as a person compared to the person next to me. While it will definitely take the full four years to fully accomplish this, I truly hope that it does happen. Also while loving myself, I hope that college teaches me how to love others. This doesn't have to be in the romantic way (although that wouldn't be bad either). I want to be able to give those close to me the respect they deserve.

Aside from learning to love myself and to love others, I strive to fully comprehend the importance of differences in the world and living within different cultures compared to that of my simple Minnesota hometown. Although I originally came from a large city, most of the people that were around me were pretty much the same. That is one of the reasons why I love going to such a large university; I get to experience so much diversity. With this experience, I hope that I am able to get encouraged to go out and explore the world and other cultures that reside in it in order to broaden my knowledge about those around me. I want to travel and experience the world, especially outside of the United States. Whether it is through classes or a future study-abroad experience, I am eager to figure out the importance of all of it.

It might seem ironic that I think about how much I yearn to know how much more there is to the world while I sit here in my little bubble of a university. I want to go out into the world and explore it, but I feel as though I need to be here and work on my schooling. My high school government teacher would always quote Mark Twain by saying, "Don't let schooling interfere with your education." Our modern education is not just through schooling, and I think this quote truly captures that idea, even though I do not always follow it completely. We, as people, learn more and more about the world and ourselves each day, and this is a concept that I believe to be extremely important when the thought of "education" is brought up in conversation. I do not want to become educated only during my college lectures; I want to become educated by experiencing the world and the environment around me. So, college, I really hope you can teach me all of this.