From Uncertainty to Purpose: How I Found My Dream School And Career

When I first started high school, I never knew where or even if I wanted to go to college. All I knew was that I wanted to do something to help people. I wanted to give people a chance to live their lives in the way they had wanted to. I wanted to do something good, but I never knew exactly what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go. 

That changed when I started receiving college flyers in the mail. I received so many fliers, and none of them ever stood out to me until I received one from Saint Bonaventure University. The flier was a beautiful aerial view of the campus in autumn. The leaves were bright colors of red, orange, and yellow. The campus looked like something I knew I could call home. 

But again, there was the dilemma of whether I had even wanted to go to college and what I was potentially going to go for. I threw away all of the fliers I had received except for the one from SBU. I kept the flier, and every time my mom asked me why she couldn’t throw it away, I did not have an answer; I just said that I wanted to keep it. 

That was exactly what I had done. I kept the flier until my junior year, when I had decided that I did, in fact, want to go to college. I had a meeting with my guidance counselor at my high school, and she asked me what I wanted to do. I said that I wasn’t sure, but I knew I wanted to help people, and that I knew I wanted to do it in a medical sense. She brought up the idea of becoming an Occupational Therapist (OT), and I knew from then on that becoming an OT was exactly what I had wanted to do. 

The discussion of where I wanted to go to college was tough. I did not want to leave the state, but I wanted to have my own freedom. I wanted to be able to be independent and have the true college experience. That’s when the flier came back out. My guidance counselor and I had gone through a list of colleges within a two-hour range of my home, and SBU stood out the most to me. And I knew this would most likely become my home for the next four to six years.  

If I had never received the flier in the mail, I probably would have never heard of SBU. But I am so grateful that I received that flier, because I truly did find my home away from home. Along with finding my home away from home, I found my best friends, have made the best memories, and truly made the most of my experience here so far. That flier just may have decided what I was going to do with my life, even if I did not know it at the time. 

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