Choosing to leave home to go to college is a huge decision and often carries a heavy financial burden. Many students like myself when I first committed to Rutgers have never been away from home for extended periods of time. Every step of the way, people seemed to question my choice. Why not stay home? Why not go to community college to save money, or commute to the closest university? What's wrong with home?

Many people I've known planned their lives around going to school and starting a career as close to home as possible. They loved where they grew up and want to stay, which is a perfectly respectable choice, but it wasn't the right one for me. All my life, I planned various versions of my future in a city, in New England and even in Europe. Living in my hometown and starting a family was never even a blip on my radar, not with countless places to explore and learn from first. I always felt that I would benefit from venturing out and finding or making a place for myself in this world.

When it came time to apply for colleges, it was my first chance to leave behind the life I knew and put myself to the test. As much as I wanted to just run out into the world for the first time, it wasn't a rushed decision, and I considered every aspect of moving out of my comfortable home and into a cramped dorm with complete strangers. I knew that I wouldn't see my parents or my friends very often, that I would be largely responsible for myself, and that I would be taking on thousands of dollars in student loans just for my undergraduate degree. Any one of those would be enough reason to stay home, but I had one reason to go that outweighed all of the risks.

To me, the benefits of going out and having a chance to fully explore myself and my interests far outweighed the benefits of playing it safe. It was too good of an opportunity to pass up, and I didn't want to give it up only to find out years later that I had become stuck in a rut because I was too scared to take that first step towards independence and begin shaping my future.

I miss home when I'm away, of course. I miss my parents, my friends, my favorite teachers from high school and some of the local spots I frequented throughout my life, but by going away I made new friends, got to experience many new things, and experienced exponential growth as a person. Now that I've gone, I'm not sure that I'll ever want to come back, though. There's enough left to tie me to home, sure, but now I know there's too much else for me to see in this world first and I want nothing more than to experience it to the fullest of my ability.