With all of the students returning to college, I began to reflect on that amazing time of my life.  It was the fall of 1976 and I was seventeen years old when my parents dropped me off at Georgia Southern.  I don’t know if they cried or not on the way back home, but I was elated to be off and on my own!  As the daughter of a preacher, I had been raised in a fairly strict environment and I loved the new experience of walking out of my dorm and not having to respond to those questions I had become so accustomed to… “Where are you going?  Who are you going with?  What time will you be back?”  Obviously, as I became a parent myself, I learned to appreciate those questions as they were really parental efforts to keep me safe from the dangers of the world, but at the time - not so much. 

What I loved most about college was that I began to learn more about myself and began a journey of appreciating who I was without feeling the need to change in order to please someone else.  Here are a few of the things that I learned about myself early on: