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The Importance of Going Away to College Essay

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The Importance of Going Away to College

Imagine the senior year of high school when students are poised to enter college and become adults. It's a time of responsibility, of being on one's own, and of shaping lives by making daily decisions. One of the major decisions is where to attend college. Should a person stay close to home and attend an in-state school where people and even campuses are somewhat familiar? Or should the decision be to start a completely new chapter in one's life by attending a college farther away, with totally new challenges? I believe the answer is definitely to leave town.

Of course, I can only speak from own experience to date. I thoroughly enjoyed high school and had excellent teachers who …show more content…

Over the Columbus Day break, I went home to Bismarck and realized that nothing had changed. Twenty of my friends met me at the airport and were excited to see me, as I was excited to see them. Through our few days together, I found out that they had remained friends with the same people from home and really hadn't met anyone new. They had not all stayed in Bismarck, but everyone I saw over the Columbus Day weekend was attending college in North Dakota.

They told me that they thought college was not really any different than high school. Not only were their classes based on most of the same materials, but also the people and surrounding reminded them of high school. They hung out with the same people and did the same things on weekends.

I asked if they regretted their choice of school, and almost all of them told me that they didn't until I told them how much I loved MIT and Boston and the new experiences I was having with people from all over the country and even the world. They wished that they could be going to school somewhere outside the Midwest.

Going to MIT really has made me grow as a person. I now have met and become friends with people from many different ethnic backgrounds. This was impossible for me to do at home in the mostly homogeneous city of Bismarck.

It's not that North Dakota didn't offer any experiences or lessons, but it couldn't offer the same things as MIT. At MIT I have

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