Growing up in a "big-little" town in Iowa, I went to a private school since I first started in preschool. Attending a kindergarten thru 8th grade school meant that I was in the same classes with the same people for almost 10 years. Most of us at the private grade schools then attended the private high school. While it was a change in scenery and people, we all came to know each other, or at least know OF each other, fairly quickly. My class was small, only 107, so we knew almost everything about each other.

When college rolled around, I had to make a decision about how I wanted the next four years of my life to be. Did I want to be swallowed in a group of thousands of students like so much of my class? Or did I want to go somewhere that I could make a difference and get to know new people- people that I hadn't known my entire life? I chose the latter. I decided on a small private school in Minnesota. It was close enough to the big city that brought me out of my element, but was still small enough that I could really find myself there and make lasting relationships.

For me, I felt that I needed breathing room to start over; I needed a clean slate. I didn't necessarily know what that meant, and I was terrified. I was so used to living in a world with the same people for over ten years, I didn't really know how to start that again. I was five-and-a-half hours from home; my closest friends were miles and miles away. I was forced to be out of my comfort zone, something that I hadn't really experienced in a long time.

I began to realize that I fell in love with the feeling of independence. I was okay not being super close to home. I was okay not seeing the same people every day. Of course I missed my friends, but I knew that it was okay that I was away from them for a while. I was going away to be my own person. I no longer had to think about what the people around me thought -- the people around me didn't know who I was. There was something so refreshing about seeing new faces every single day, something so amazing about the possibilities of new friendships and experiences -- a feeling I didn't recognize.

The period of starting over was, to me, a little overdue. I was scared, unsure, uneasy, anxious, but excited. I knew that the experiences that I had in college would be so different than those that I had in high school. The people I met would have a first impression of me, not 2,000 different ones.

I still have so many new things to experience. I am not stuck anymore; I can discover new things about myself that I wouldn't have the chance too if I didn't take the leap and fall into something completely new.