The college experience

- In college there is so much freedom in terms of time, scheduling. - You're not only choosing your own schedule, but you're choosing what classes you want to take, what classes you don't want to take. - Around the time of freshman orientation we were given these booklets with hundreds of courses that you could take from dozens of different departments and programs and I thought it would be a good idea to just grab a highlighter and go through every single page and mark up every class that sounded remotely interesting and at the end of this, when I got to the end of the book, I probably had about 60 courses highlighted. Concepts of the cosmos, sociology of the school, race in American, U.S. education. - The cool thing about college is that any given point, in any given day, you're going to run into a really amazing person who's going to blow your mind about something that you haven't thought about. - The support system is amazing. All the kids here are so passionate and they're so into their learning. I think that's what I find different than high school. I'm not the one that's pushing and pushing and everybody else is just satisfied with doing what they need to graduate. - The students actually want to be there. That's a big difference than high school to college. Everybody is really friendly. There's not as much cliques. Everybody is just cool, nice, you can talk to anyone. That's the best thing about college. - Just being exposed to new ideas, new people, new cultures. It's completely mind changing. - I work three jobs. I work at the admissions office, I work for my cultural center, and I work at my residential college. I studied abroad twice. Once in Madrid and once in London and I've had two internships, one in Minneapolis and one in Alaska, and over the course of all these experiences there have been several instances where I'm just like I cannot believe how radically different my life is now than it was before. - Because it's fun to look at Shakespeare when you're actually in London or it's fun to be able to dream something and then work for it and then see it happen. - I cannot believe, everyday I am so surprised by how much I have grown since I was in high school. When I was in high school and I was looking at colleges, I had no idea how I was going to fare. I didn't know how I was going to succeed. It seemed like this big thing so far away that everyone else was in on except for me. I really found myself and I know who I am and I'm just so excited by continuing this intellectual journey. It's just something that's very exciting to me. - Basically, it has allowed me to dream much bigger, and not only dream much bigger, but also realize that those dreams are very possible as well.