Transformation-My College Experience

       College. The four year paradise. The training session for the real world. The stepping stone to your future. I heard what I just spent the past four years doing called many things while I was doing it but no words can quite sum up the experience. It’s described as a place to find yourself and get a degree so you can go and pursue your dreams, but it’s so much more than that. When my older siblings and others tried to tell me about what they did or were doing in college, I could only grasp at pictures in my imagination. Once I earned my way into UMD and started there in the fall of 09, things became much more clear and incredible beyond my imagination. When I first started there, I had barely ever left St. Mary’s county and had never spent more than a week away from home. I was so lost and confused, surrounded by dozens of other guys on my dorm floor who liked to do wild things, that I barely came out of my room that first semester, other than to go to class and a couple of Navigator events. I honestly didn’t know what in the world I was doing there and if I would make it. Time went along though, and I started to get the hang of it and I branched out to new people. There were a couple of guys from Navs who played a huge role in shaking me from my extremely introverted nature that I had. One of them knocked on my door and invited me to join him and some others four floors down for a bible study they were having. The other was some dude who I randomly got placed into a car with for a hiking trip and we became good buds, and had one of the greatest bromances UMD Navs has ever seen, when he taught me Settlers and I taught him about how MD snow days worked.

       Things really grew from there as I got more and more involved with the Navs and I started to realize what it was I really wanted to study once I discovered the journalism was not for me. I kept on rolling, moving up from being a sophomore and welcoming in a huge new freshman class in Navs to being a junior and really starting to dive into the business school, so much so that I decided to add another major on. I finally hit my senior year where I had some of the worst and best times of my college career, wrapping things up on a high note with my what and why mission, which if you haven’t heard about yet, read my last blog post to read about the experience that impacted my life more than anything else ever has. The thing is, I never would have known what this was like and have had all of the amazing experiences and met all of the new friends I have if I hadn’t done all that I did. Like I said, people try to describe what college is like and you get a whole mix of different answers. As with most things, you don’t know until you try. College just happens to be unique because it’s an environment built to have anything and everything happen, whether it be 4 in the afternoon or 4 in the morning.

       As I start off on this next phase of life, through what I’m sure will be quite the transition, I know that I will have many more wild adventures and a whole lot of learning. I’ve already kicked things off and I’ve learned more stuff in the past couple of weeks working then I had in a long time. Things will certainly look different and my schedule won’t allow as many nights of crashing at 3 am, but I know that this is where I need to be. Whatever comes my way, I know that I have the people I just spent my college years with and the Big Guy himself with me all the way, and that I can have just as much fun if I dive right in and see what the “real world” has to offer a guy from St. Mary’s.

       And remember, this all started with just a thought.