Making Way for Life in College

High school was hard, but leaving high school was surprisingly even harder. I mean, no one really loves waking up at six in the morning to sit in a hot classroom to learn about tangent lines or Macbeth or some other piece of knowledge students deem useless.
But as soon as you finally figure out high school – who your true friends are, how to study for exams, which teachers have snacks and are willing to share, how to truly enjoy the experience – it’s all over. Then you’re forced to face finally the reality that you’re not just leaving high school, but you’re leaving the life you have spent the last 18 years building, to enter the world of adulthood in college.
So in preparing for my departure, I spent hours upon hours in local stores searching for any random item to make my new dorm a comfortable place to call a makeshift home. What I will do, like millions of other soon to be college students is attempt to use my credit card at one of these miscellaneous retail stores to buy a solid piece of ground to stand on as reality is being ripped from underneath me.
Here’s when the tantalizing voices of self-doubt come into play: “I can’t be a liberal arts major, I’ll never find a job after school. What if I can’t find a friend and I have to eat every meal alone? What if my professors are torturous monsters?” And after about $500, the self-doubt faded away creating a false sense of readiness among the mountain of new things from bedding, to Q-tips, to Tupperware. 
Aside from shopping, the majority of my time during these last few weeks has gone towards my family and friends. This final goodbye to my hometown almost feels like I’m never coming back, when in reality, it’s only for a few, short months. I know it’s more of a “See you later,” than anything else, and yet it’s a little bittersweet regardless.  But not all of leaving is bad. With the fear, the anxiety, and the colossal credit card bills come massive waves of excitement and giddiness for the year to come.
Leaving for college marks the end for everything that my life is made of at the moment.  We lose our comfort because this is now unchartered territory. We’re not kids anymore, but we are also different from adults because the leftover naive hope from childhood is still embedded within us. That small, almost tangible piece of faith we have in ourselves and our future always conquers the fear, which makes attending school and abandoning our comfort zone entirely worth it.
And while college could be seen as the end, it, more importantly, defines the beginning for the wonderful, new pieces of my life. College is my hard earned golden ticket to finding myself, along with lifelong friends and our passions. In high school, I didn’t get a choice: I studied math, English, science, a foreign language, and history, regardless of my interest.
But here I am finally presented with the opportunity to choose; the right to make a choice of who I want to be and what I want to dedicate my time and effort towards to learn. These academic institutions will give me the tools I need to create the life I have always dreamed of living, whether that be a veterinarian, a lawyer, a surgeon, or perhaps even a writer. 
The ability to rise to the challenge of achieving my hefty goals is another matter altogether, but what matters is that I get the chance to try to manipulate the unknown future ahead of me.
Manyak, a local of Cape May for all 18 years of her life, is a graduate of Lower Cape May Regional High School. She is now in her freshman year at Villanova University as an English major.