A small, ramshackle village nestled among a mighty mountain range. Fields full of crops, goats, and farmhands. Roads that have never endured the tread of a luxury sports car. A nation at the edge of the modern world.

This is where the path to my college education began: the rural mountain villages of Albania. Most people don't know where Albania is, but it's just across the Adriatic Sea off Italy's eastern coast. It's a tiny country, but it's my family's home. It's here where one risky decision allowed a child to pursue a higher education half a century later.

It began with my grandfather, a man dedicated to both his work and his family. I've only ever known him as the man with a cane and funny jokes that make us all laugh from continents away. In his prime, however, my grandfather was a skilled architect and carpenter. He traveled all across the various villages and towns of his region, constructing houses and other structures. According to my mother, if there was something someone needed, they would always go to my grandfather without fail. There was nothing he couldn't build.

However, even with the vision and the skill my grandfather possessed, his family still lived in relative poverty under the country's then-Communist political climate. With three children and a wife, my grandfather had a lot of people to provide for. Most would throw themselves into their work believing money to be the immediate solution to each of their problems. My grandfather, on the other hand, understood what was really important. Having money would allow them to develop solutions, but it was not the only solution.

So, while my grandfather trekked across the region building houses, he decided to also teach his children various tasks around the house and surrounding farmland. He told them stories, taught them about the world they lived in, and never once prohibited their ability to dream. He always encouraged his children to both try and do their best, supporting and loving them unconditionally all the while. His most important decision, however, was sending my mother to the finest school that money could buy.

That decision, despite its financial risk, was worth it.

My mother and aunt traveled from their tiny town of goats and fields to the big city of Korce. There, like their father before them, they threw themselves into their studies, and when the time came, they earned their degrees. Their degrees allowed them to acquire jobs, through which they could better their lives. It was this continuous stream of education and hard work that -- some years down the line -- allowed my mother, father, and older sister (who was only three-years-old at the time) to win the lottery for emigration, to acquire the means necessary to move to the United States. Soon, my family found themselves in Chicago, and a world of both opportunities and hardships arose. Three years later, I was born, and my parents knew that despite their struggling, the hardship would be worth it so long as their daughters earned an education.

And now, here I am, attending one of the finest universities in both my state and my country. My sister and I have both achieved numerous academic honors over the years, through which new opportunities for advancement in our education and inherent careers will arise. More of our family members joined us in the States, and where once was a struggling immigrant family of three, there is now an extended family of eight living comfortably in each sense of the word. But it would not be so without an education, without the decision to put education and the pursuit of a happier, comfortable lifestyle above all else. Knowledge, when nurtured by compassion and encouraged by curiosity, is the key to achieving any dream one may conjure up. With access to education, children all over the world can finally start on their own paths towards better lives.

So while I begin my college education in the United States of America, I remember my heritage, founded in that land of picturesque mountains and hard-working people 5,120 miles away. Humbled, I look back, I thank my family, and I begin to dream.