As an out-of-state student attending UNC, I rarely get the chance to go home, and when I do, it is far from just a couple hours down the interstate like many of my peers. As a junior in high school, I was adamant that I was going to go to a college far away. I was set on going to a school in which the only reasonable way to get there was a plane. I thought I would leave the small Chicago suburb that I grew up in and make my new home somewhere else. And I was right, I did just that.

I am thankful for that stubborn junior-year self. Solely considering schools far away helped me fall in love with and eventually choose UNC -- the school that was, and continues to be, the school of my dreams. As cheesy as it may sound, not a day goes by on campus without me thinking about how incredibly lucky I am to be at such a wonderful place, even if it's as I'm trudging to the econ test that I am hopelessly under-prepared for. I have made a new life here. I have developed the best friendships I've ever had, delved into the academic areas that I'm interested in, immersed myself in both my sorority and my track team, and fallen in love with someone even more deeply than I did with this school. The last time I went back to Chicago, I told my friends when I'll be back in Chapel Hill by saying, “I'll be home on Monday." That's when I truly realized that Chapel Hill had become my new home.

However, when I was deciding on a college three years ago, I wasn't correct about one part of my decision. I thought wherever I decided to go would eventually replace the town I grew up in as my home. Chapel Hill is now my home, but my hometown will always remain my home as well. UNC, and the cocoon of Chapel Hill that surrounds it, has so much to offer, but it doesn't have the yearly height marks on the inside of the pantry door, showing the big jumps from year to year until leveling out just as I left for college. It doesn't have my childhood bedroom, filled with pictures from races, events and nights with friends that seem impossible to have been taken four years ago and bedding that makes me question why my mom allowed my fifteen-year old self to decorate a room. UNC doesn't have the certain crosswalk sign that meant I was four minutes from home as I walked home from middle school every afternoon. Chapel Hill doesn't have the long road through the forest preserve that I biked (and later drove) down when I needed to think. There is no intersection that at which I got pulled over, fake cried and left unscathed and ticket-less, twice. There's no park that I lived at during elementary school summers, where I developed the freckles I still have today.

My home will always be the same white house with black shutters at the end of the same driveway that always gets a lake-sized puddle in the middle. Home will always be my mom standing at the green front door ready to hug me as I walk in for the first time in four months. But now, hundreds of miles away, I have another home. Home is also the beautiful quad under the sky that's repping our school color most of the time. Home is having no idea what is going on in The Pit and never being able to find an empty table in Davis Library. Home is walking hand-in-hand with the guy I love through the arboretum and half-walking, half-crawling in heels with friends down Franklin Street to BSkis at two in the morning. And there are no other two places in the world I would rather call home.