National Life Writing Month: My Journey to WSU

The month of November is recognized as National Life Writing Month. This month is used to help writers (or just about anyone!) destress by reflecting on their life. Especially during such an influential and anxiety-evoking time, taking a few minutes to be reminded of happy moments in your past can be a great way to temporarily forget current events and focus on your self-care. While some may focus on their biggest accomplishment, the best day ever or an entire autobiography, how you recognize this month is up to you! The biggest step is to take out your pen (or laptop) and jot all of your thoughts down. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar––simply jot down what you’re thinking at that moment and move on!

In order to celebrate and join in, I decided to share with you all a bit about me and how I eventually made it here to Winona State, writing for Her Campus.

I grew up in a small town in central Iowa. I’ve lived my entire life on my family’s farm. There, my dad works as a corn and soybean farmer in partnership with his brother. My mother works as a teacher at the local high school and has for more than 20 years. I also have a younger brother who I have (lovingly) pestered my entire life.

Growing up, I was involved in quite literally everything. I played all the sports and was in all the clubs. I was constantly running from one meeting to the next, going from practice to game, and squeezing in time to be a diligent student in between all of that. If my mom thought my life was overwhelming to handle in elementary and middle school, she was in for a real treat in high school.

By the time I was filling out scholarship forms and college applications during my senior year, I was involved in twelve extracurricular activities plus my church involvement and social life. Let me count that out for you–– volleyball, basketball, soccer, softball, choir, theater, school newspaper, student council, National Honors Society, EAGLE, 4-H, and FFA. That doesn’t even include my leadership roles–– co-captain, president, secretary, treasurer, editor-in-chief; you name it, I probably did it. Somehow, I was also able to maintain a 4.0 GPA and earn three-time academic all-state awards and the status of valedictorian. Honestly, I was superhuman to keep it all together like that for the first 17 years of my life. 

My life was absolutely jam-packed with everything imaginable, and I hardly ever said no to anyone about anything. I constantly enjoyed the challenge of balancing more and more things and strengthening my time management skills. And to be honest, my time management skills are as strong as iron at this point.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved being busy. Amazingly, I never experienced a major burnout, and I racked up a resume full of many accomplishments, but sometimes I wondered whether I was really passionate about everything I was involved in. I was worried about quitting because I knew that I was not a quitter–– and in my head, quitters were failures.

But how does this all relate to my journey to Winona State? 

Well, to find that answer we must travel a little further back into my history to sophomore year. It seems like an unlikely, or perhaps quite cliche, place for this story to begin–– at the regional college fair. 

It seemed like a good idea–– the school toted off the entire sophomore class to a regional college fair sponsored by the local university. For us high schoolers, it really just seemed like a great way to get out of school. Let me preface this by saying my class wasn’t the hardest-working group of teenagers you’ve ever seen. Nonetheless, we joined the hordes of high school sophomores in the McLeod Center and perused the hundreds of booths with schools ranging anywhere from the local community to college to the Air Force Academy. Quite literally every school in the state of Iowa, and probably many within the Midwest, were in attendance at this college fair, hoping to recruit these country kids to their prestigious colleges. And let me just say–– it ended up working for me. 

I walked around with a group of friends, much more interested in scouting out cute boys from neighboring schools than considering their future. We checked out the booths with the most (and best) free stuff, plus all of our favorite state universities for stickers, pens, bags, and any other item they could possibly slap their logo on. When they handed us packets, we stuffed them into our complimentary bags, never to be seen again (or so we thought, but I’ll get to that in a moment).

But how, exactly, did that lead me to Winona State? Well, my group had hit a bit of a lull, and we weren’t very interested in any of the other booths. I broke off from the group and decided to visit the Winona State booth, simply because purple was my favorite color and the general area of their booth was fairly desolate. There, they handed me a few pamphlets and sent me away with a smile. I didn’t think much of it. The papers were stuffed in the bag, and that was that.

I joined the majority of my classmates sitting bored on the bleachers. We waited for what seemed like an eternity before we were finally called over the intercom and boarded the school bus back to our tiny brick school. By the end of the day, Winona State was already non-existent in my headspace. Nonetheless, I kept the extensive stack of papers and free stuff in the depths of my closet. 

Maybe they would be useful later.

As I found out weeks later, I had been added to many email and postal lists from the colleges to which I had given my information. For the remainder of my sophomore year and, to be honest, the entirety of my college career, I was swamped with pestering college mail. (Can you say waste of paper?) In the beginning, I brushed it off, only opening up the big, promising packets in search of free branded items. As time went on, I realized that college was coming closer and closer and began to store away some of the pamphlets for a rainy day–– the day I would actually choose my future college.

Flash forward to the summer before my senior year, and I was starting to panic. I was about to go into the final year of my high school career, yet I had absolutely no plan as to where my life would go after the year ended. As per usual, I was feeling the constant pressure of my hectic lifestyle, and it was wearing on me like never before. I felt as if there was an increased need for me to commit to a college early because I was the top-ranked student; all eyes were on me, right?

On a random August day, I uncovered the stack of reading material from the college fair in the depths of my closet. I blew off the dust and began examining each of the booklets, alongside others I had received in the mail and had found an interest in. I began to create a list of qualities in my head about what I wanted in my prospective college:

1. It needed to be close to home. I wanted to be not too close, but close enough that I could come home for a weekend or in an emergency. Not so close that I could live at home or come home on a daily basis.

2. I needed to feel safe and welcome. This was important both within the community and on campus. College is supposed to be the best four years of your life, yet my introverted-self knew that I could never truly achieve this unless I found a community that could take me outside of my comfort zone and encourage me to meet new people and try new things.

3. Affordability. I do not want to be in student loan debt for the rest of my life.

4. An English program. At the time, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with my life (and to be honest, I still don’t), but I knew I wanted to be in the English program, so this quality was an absolute must for me.

In the span of two weeks that summer, I ended up narrowing my list down to four colleges. I received an email from Winona State about their touring weekend on a Monday, and that Thursday afternoon my mom and I were on a three-hour drive to Winona, MN to visit the campus and the city.

It was the first campus tour I had been on, but I was absolutely in love with it. It was a city, yet it felt like a small town. The bluffs and the river were beautiful. Throughout the entirety of my visit on that day, I felt invited and welcome. The campus was small and easy to navigate. To be honest, it was a dream. For weeks afterward, I told people about how good my visit was and how much I loved it there.

However, I continued to schedule more college visits because I didn’t want to commit right away just in case something bigger and better was out there. I ended up touring three more colleges of varying enrollment size, distance and price. By the time I had taken my fourth and final tour, I was still in love with Winona State, yet another in-state college had caught my eye.

This college was in the downtown area of a city in Iowa only about an hour from home. Their campus was small, like Winona State’s, yet their enrollment was even smaller. They were ranked nationally for their internship programs, which was a big draw. It was a fun and inviting experience, yet the danger of the area and the cost of private schooling eventually tipped the scale towards Winona State.

That December, I committed to Winona State, a college I had never even heard of before that college fair my sophomore year. Finding Winona State was a complete act of fate–– I could have never imagined this was where I’d be. 

It was an exciting point for me, but my story doesn’t end there. 

In March, COVID came to the nation and put everything on halt. All of my dual-enrollment college classes shifted to online teaching. In Iowa, education was completely on hold for more than a month before it resumed online. My mom, a high school teacher, and my brother, a high school sophomore, had absolutely no school work to complete because of the lockdown. Our household was quite literally at a standstill.

A few short weeks after the pandemic began to take a toll, I began to realize that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to play my fourth and final season of soccer. Everything was in jeopardy, and it began to weigh on many high school seniors globally. As I consider the span of my entire life, this was the most stagnant period I have quite literally ever been in. I had to put my busy lifestyle on hold and truly find out what I enjoyed and what I would choose to occupy my time with.

Before, when people asked me if I had hobbies, I would tell them about all the sports I played or all the clubs I was in. And when they asked for things aside from that, I would pause and think–– I would think for a long time. 

When was the last time I decided to do something because I freely wanted to and chose to do it?

I did a lot of soul searching during that time. Being my introverted self, I didn’t struggle as much as many of my classmates, yet I still felt the weight and grief of everything we were missing. Thankfully, my class was still able to complete many of our final events–– prom, graduation, softball and baseball were all hosted over the summer and helped us say goodbye to that chapter of our lives. Over the summer, my schedule was back to its busy self as I balanced working at the local pool with softball and my social life. I wanted to make the most of my final summer before college, yet I also knew that I needed to make as much money as possible in order to make paying for college feasible (remember the affordability aspect of it?).

Even though I didn’t get to check everything off of my summer bucket-list, I still had lots of great memories with my family, friends and co-workers. Because of the lockdown, it truly felt like the longest summer ever and I am so grateful that, although it was a difficult time, I was still able to spend lots of it in a loving and supporting environment. But eventually, the summer came to an end, and it was time for my parents to cart me off to Winona State. 

I packed up all of my things and filled my room with as much Hobby Lobby decor as you could imagine. Because of the COVID precautions, I came back for two more weeks (my last hurrah) and then finally said goodbye to my friends and family before making the solo drive to Winona. 

When I got here, I was already a nervous wreck. I knew one person from the university, a junior who I didn’t know very well. I was terrified that my introverted nature would prevent me from meeting new people. On my first day here, I got my laptop and then went to work on finishing setting up and organizing my room. I went to my hall’s introductory meeting and then got dinner solo after failing to meet anyone.

That night, I was a crying mess when I called my mom to tell her how much I missed her and how much it sucked here. I hadn’t been here for more than a few hours, yet I was already freaking out about not making friends. She calmed me down, and I somehow went to sleep on my springy twin XL mattress that night. 

The next day, I went to my orientation class for the first day of Welcome Week. There, we learned the ins and outs of campus while our orientation leader hyped up the university and how much fun we would have while we were here. At one point, she talked about how she was in lots of clubs, including a campus ministry. Although I wasn’t super devoted to my faith, I knew it was something I wanted to pursue while I was here. 

Somehow, I got the courage to go up to her after the session had ended and asked her about it. She kindly told me about Chi Alpha, a campus ministry here at Winona State. She gave me her number and invited me to go out to a local ice cream place that night with some friends. That night, me, my orientation leader and a group of more than ten girls walked down to Third Street for some delicious ice cream.

That night when I got back to my dorm, I wasn’t a crying mess and I wasn’t ready to go home. I knew my journey at Winona State had just begun. And although I was fearful of what it would bring, I was excited to embrace the experience and take whatever it threw at me. 

During the next few months, I gradually found a network of friends and acquaintances that supported me and truly made Winona feel like my home. Instead of constantly moving between tasks like I had during my go-go-go lifestyle, I was able to soak up all of the moments and truly become acclimated to my environment. I spent my days as a studious academic and my nights as a friend looking to meet new people and do new things. Although COVID has limited my ability to truly see the campus and university for what it is, the uniqueness of my experience has made it that much more special.

Slowing down during the pandemic has been part of what has made my journey so special. I was able to realize that, although I’m still figuring out what my hobbies are, I love making memories, and they can’t always be made in the structured environments of organized clubs and sports. 

Instead, you must let fate take hold and direct you in the way you’re destined to go. It was fate that brought me to Winona State, and it is fate that is helping me make all of my memories and relationships here. 

I’ve finally come to the realization that I cannot organize and plan every aspect of my life. Every organized club, council and sport in the world could never satisfy me; instead, I must let freedom take hold and let spontaneity guide my life. 

Life is short and time is fleeting, so I am here, finally, to let fate guide me along this path. 

• college
• life
• november
• Winona