The point of college, as far as society is concerned, is to learn. The idea is that we get an education somewhere between watching football and getting smashed. This education is more than just what we learn in our classes, however. The most important things we learn in college are the life lessons we receive along the way.
After reading my uncomfortably serious piece from last week, my editor told me I sometimes take too long to get to my point. So here is my point. I believe that everyone should attend a college outside of commuting distance from their hometown. We underestimate how much of our worldview and even our identity is shaped by our environment. Being placed into a new and unfamiliar place with new and unfamiliar people exposes us to new experiences and a new perspective. Living far from home forces us to learn and experience things we otherwise wouldn’t.
Let me talk for a minute about my hometown. Historians generally believe that white people originated in Europe. This is false. White people come from Milton, Wis. About 200,000-or-so years ago, we emerged from a hole in the ground somewhere near where the post office currently sits and spread out to populate the globe. Today, about 6,000 people live there protected on all sides by impenetrable walls of corn fields. All of them are white, and they’ve never met a white stereotype they didn’t live up to. Voters in Milton need not provide photo ID at polling locations, but a title to a pickup truck is required to vote. This is merely a formality, however, as elections are actually decided by tractor pulls. The mayor is the person with the biggest tractor. Okay, I’m hyperbolizing a bit, but this next part is no exaggeration: on Friday and Saturday nights, Milton teenagers get their kicks by going to the nearby city of Janesville and just driving their trucks on the straight, busy main street. There are no turns. There are stoplights every couple hundred feet. They just drive their trucks in a straight line, stopping every minute or so. I mean, honestly? Go blow things up or something. If there is one good thing I have to say about Milton, it’s that at least not all of the radio stations play country music. I’m kidding. They all play country music.
That is the life college rescued me from. My decision to move out of town for college opened me up to the realization that there is more to life than corn, pickup trucks and country music. I am exposed daily to people who look and sound different than me. I am forced to think about social and political issues that I never had to contend with before.
This change in my environment very evidently affects my identity as well. Despite its flaws, Milton was a beautiful place to grow up and I have no complaints about the first 18 years of my life. By my senior year, I pretty much had high school figured out. I was getting good grades without any effort whatsoever, I was captain of our show choir, I had leading roles in our play and musical, I had awesome friends and needless to say girls were throwing themselves at me left and right. High school was a fantasy world. College is certainly no worse, but I am definitely a different person. Here, I am not a show choir captain and actor. Here, I am an opinion writer.
My life here in Madison is so radically different from my former life in Milton that I often forget that I even lived it at all. College so far has been an amazing journey of novelty and discovery. I’ve learned so much about the world and myself that I simply would not have been presented with had I decided to stay in the Janesville area. For this reason, I believe everyone should look to go far away for college.
Do you think there is an advantage to attending school far from home? Please send all letters and feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
