As a strong believer that one can learn anything he or she needs to know about life from a Disney movie, I took advice on leaving my small-town home for college from "Finding Nemo". Like Nemo and the friends he made in the tank at the dentist’s office, I was stuck in my own small pond -- and like these fish, all I wanted was to leave. The fish being kept in the small tank dreamed of escaping to the ocean; my escape came in the form of college. But much like the fish left bobbing around the ocean in plastic baggies after their dramatic exit from their former home, I was left drifting aimlessly, a small fish in a big pond.

In high school, I was certainly a big fish in a small pond. Growing up in a classic small town, where the people I stood next to at kindergarten graduation were those standing next to me at high school graduation, I always had an end goal in mind: college. All of the time I spent in my hometown just seemed like a preface to something greater. But once I made the leap, filled out hours and hours of applications, anxiously awaited decision letters, spent days online shopping for my dorm room, sent many awkward texts to my new roommates, packed everything up in my car, said a tearful goodbye to my dog, and watched my family walk out of my dorm room, the only thought I had was, "Now what?"

Before I left for college, I knew what I was doing every second of every day. I had at least a few friends in all of my classes and each club or team I was a part of I had joined either because my friends were in it, or my friends joined because I was. I felt comfortable in everything I did. I would have certainly considered myself a social, outgoing person, but at college, being basically alone in a new place, I was almost afraid to be that person. I sat in classes by myself and hoped the professor wouldn’t assign group work and I only went to a club meeting if my friends were going as well. There are so many opportunities available to students, so many things I was interested in doing, but I was afraid to take that step alone.

My breakthrough moment came slowly and only out of frustration with my own lack of self-confidence. I was in an English class that constantly split up for group work and I knew absolutely no one in the class, not even someone who lived on my floor or was a friend of a friend with whom I could try to start a conversation. The first few times this happened, I casually snuck into a group and remained silent almost the entire time, as did the rest of my group. One day, I had finally had enough of fading into the background when that is so not who I am, so when the professor said to split into groups, I whipped my seat around to face a group of girls who all already knew one another and said, “I’m gonna work with you guys.” (This, in retrospect, is probably not the best way to make friends, but I must have had coffee that morning, so I was feeling bold).

I worked with this group for the rest of the semester and after a few weeks, our conversations became less and less about the assignment and we started to just talk. The girls were all very nice, and one even became a better friend of mine in the following semester. They probably won’t be my bridesmaids or aunts to my kids, but this relationship was probably just as important to me as those close bonds I formed with others. I was fully myself again and I felt so much more at home in my scary, new, big pond. College students may all be from different ponds with different ways of life, but in the end, we are all just fish, trying to swim through these new depths together.