My junior year of high-school, I was fortunate enough to have a caring teacher who required us to research colleges as a graded project. That search led me to a small, private, all-girls, liberal arts school in a tiny town called Roanoke, Virginia. After ten minutes on their website, I knew I had found my dream school: Hollins University.

Immediately, my friends and family hounded me with questions. Aren’t you afraid of going so far away from home? Why not go to a co-ed university and have boys around? Isn’t Roanoke that place where that colony disappeared? Yes, I was afraid of going far from home. I didn’t want the drama of relationships, and no you’re thinking of The Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, which today is North Carolina. Not Virginia.

Truth be told, I had a lot of sleepless nights. Most adults I knew had gone to large-scale co-ed universities in big cities. Most of my friends were going to schools in Orlando, Tampa, Gainesville, and Jacksonville, my hometown. But something about Hollins intrigued me, and I took the chance.

Once I attended my first year, I knew I was exactly where I belonged. My first year, I did things I never would have dreamed I had the courage to do: white-water rafted, performed in a small play, was published in the school’s literary magazines, nude-modeled, hiked mountains, worked on a Cherokee Reservation, made speeches, and learned to rock-climb when I was initially afraid of heights.

After my fall semester of my sophomore year, however, I was completely burnt out. I had overdone myself with twenty credits and a part-time job. I ended up taking a semester off from Hollins. Upon leaving, the Dean said that she hoped I would return and hugged me goodbye.

I ended up returning the following fall term. There are opportunities offered at a small women’s college which you cannot get at a regular university. Even as a nineteen-year-old sophomore, I was granted an internship position as a research assistant in a county-wide literacy initiative program. I wouldn’t get that opportunity at any place other than a small women’s college. Every single day I walk out my door, I am physically surrounded by strong-minded women, which gives me the emotional reminder that women are powerful and capable. Not only are you celebrated for the person that you are, but you are championed specifically for the woman that you are. After all, “Women who are going places start at Hollins.”