Last year I traveled to New York City to visit a friend. She was, at the time, a student at St. Johns University in Queens and was loving her new life in the city. She would travel into Manhattan almost twice a week and experience all of the culture of New York that I dreamed about my whole life. Unfortunately, I am stuck living at home and commuting to a school only twenty minutes away. Don’t get me wrong, the school I am attending is fantastic, and there are so many opportunities and programs from which to choose that I sometimes feel overwhelmed. However, it’s not where I saw myself. I saw myself in my friend’s position, living hours away from home and having fun in a vibrant city full of culture and diversity.

In high school, I had a dream, more like a vision of myself, of the future. I saw myself at a coffee shop in Greenwich Village, sipping on a latte and reading a novel, with the keys to my dorm room and my NYU ID card hanging around my neck or sitting on the steps to the Met having lunch after wandering through the museum all day. But that dream was shattered when I saw the cost of attendance for NYU, and calculated the amount of debt I would accrue from only 4 years of studies there. So I made an adult decision and went with my safety school, SUNY Albany.

Sitting on a bench in Washington Park not even a block from NYU.

As I said before, UAlbany is a fantastic school with hundreds of great programs and opportunities, of which I am excited to take advantage. But it wasn't my first choice, mainly because of how close it was to home. I only decided to go there and to live at home in order to save my future self from over $100,000 in student loans.

That is the problem with the university system in America. Students who are academically eligible to go to a great school are being forced to vacate their dreams, simply because they don’t want to sign their souls away to student loan companies. A simple Google search on the top colleges in America will bring up some surprising statistics. Tuition costs are skyrocketing and many people who are smart enough to attend can’t actually afford to attend large accredited universities. As much as I planned to go to a big university with a world renowned academic program and live the life I wanted so badly, the finances didn't work out for me. After a while I accepted the fact that I couldn’t have my dream college experience, and I can now say I'm okay with it.

What I really want to say is that you can only plan so much into the future, because you can only lay out a course for so long. Speaking from my own experience, you should always make two plans. One plan that is your dream, and another that is still your dream but is more realistic. I am all for cliches like dreaming big and reaching for the stars, but I know I should always have a back up plan; a place or a person or a thing that will help me if my dreams fall through. And remember, just because a dream didn't happen today doesn't mean it won’t happen tomorrow.

"If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans." -Woody Allen