From Back Roads to Brick Streets: A Change From Small Town Life To University Living

After growing up in a rural farm town in northern Ohio, there are three things a person learns pretty fast: one, the most exciting event on a Friday night is the high school football game. Two, no matter what route you take, you will get stuck behind a tractor during growing season (This will most likely occur when you are running late). And three, you are going to get a pretty big wake up call if you ever decide to leave. 
 

I knew as a junior in high school that I was setting my sights on Ohio University, but I also knew that choosing OU over a smaller college was going to bring all kinds of new experiences into my life. 
 
You see, the town I grew up in had a population of around 5,000 people. I saw the same people on a daily basis. I could go into a local shop or gas station, and the workers would often greet me with a wave and “Hello, Holly! Going to the game Friday?” It was comforting and reliable.
 
So when I moved into my dorm room almost a year and a half ago, on a campus that holds roughly 22,000 people from all over, I would safely describe myself as a little shell-shocked. I like to jokingly relate myself to Amanda Bynes’ in “She’s The Man” when her character is entering the guys residence hall for the first time and various pieces of sporting equipment goes flying through the air while students travel through the halls on bicycles and scooters. Only in my case, I was the small town tomboy entering into a domain of pink rugs and purple curtains. 
 
And that shell-shocked feeling lasted for almost the entirety of my first quarter on campus. Every day I was discovering something new, things that were practically unheard of back in my hometown. 
 
One of my favorite examples is the amount of Coach products that I would see girls carrying around. They had bags, they had shoes, there were even rain boots. I had never seen so many designer labels in my life. Back in my town, our idea of designer was the Carhartt brand, and having some form of its outwear was almost a necessity if you were going to be working outside in the winter. 
 
And then there was the North Face brand, which I heard about from my first roommate who kept saying she needed to buy a new jacket before it got too cold.  When I asked what North Face was, she looked at me like I was crazy. Truth be told, I was starting to believe I was. 
 
But the differences pertained to more than clothing and fashion; there were so many cultural differences that I was experiencing. The first couple weeks of classes were especially eye opening, because I saw people from different cultures, like a group of young woman chatting with one another wearing traditional clothing from their respective countries and a few young men chatting with one another in a language that I had never been exposed to. It was so different from anything that I had ever experienced back home and I wondered how I was going to survive four years in this, more or less, foreign world.
 
And yet here I am, nearly a year and a half later, plowing through. I am still the small town tomboy who wears t-shirts and old jeans everyday, who listens to classic rock and country music and still detests the color pink. But I also think I have grown as a student and as a person because of the many people who I have met that were raised in diverse environments and who were willing to share what I did not know about the world. 
 

I have been swing dancing with a young man from India, practiced my Spanish language skills with a girl from Holland, and I have shown a Chinese man around the Columbus Zoo with a group of friends. These are experiences that I will cherish for a lifetime and now I have the opportunity to share them with younger generations in my hometown. I encourage them to travel outside the safety zone of what they have always known. 
 
But in the meantime, I am going to continue discovering things for myself here in Athens.  Next on the list: understanding the allure of UGG’s.