I’m finally graduating this summer and obtaining my degree from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras (UPRRP) so I find myself incredibly excited, since I will be closing one of the most fundamental chapters of my life and embarking into the unknown, the real adult world. Now that my college years are coming to an end and I’m a mere month away from finishing all my classes, bittersweet feelings are coming up to the surface.
The time I have spent as a student at UPR has been some of my most formative years. I was eighteen years old when I started my first semester and let’s be honest, we think we know everything there is to know about the world at that age. A lot of the time we can be stubborn, not open to advice, and looking forward to the brand new “adult world,” or at least I was. Now at 24, I look back and wonder how I could have ever thought like that.
La IUPI has been my home for six years. It has seen me through my ever changing phases and evolutions and grow into a young woman prepared to face the world. The University of Puerto Rico is our country’s first institution of higher education and a part of the public university system. Universities are oftentimes the breeding grounds for change and demands for social justice and equality, which is part of the reason why some have issues with my campus. As a student at UPRRP, I have been a witness to differing opinions about our University and its students. Some say that UPRRP is the best university in Puerto Rico and produces the best professionals in each field, while others say that students at La IUPI are just dissidents and communists. Regardless, the University of Puerto Rico is an institution that creates individual thinkers that oftentimes wish to fight and defend their own right to accessible education.
This meeting of ideas and diverse individuals has been one of the main reasons I have appreciated my time at university so much. I have been able to learn and grow as a person by being confronted with new perspectives and knowledge. A part of this learning process has come from discussions in class with classmates and professors. The other part came from being involved in the bigger UPRRP student community by participating in clubs and student organizations. I have also developed friendships that will last a lifetime.
All this to say that La IUPI has greatly impacted the beginning of my adult life and now I must say goodbye. While I have concrete plans for the next stage of my life, it doesn’t take away the fact that leaving behind such a special place will be hard. A new beginning always brings about a certain level of anxious excitement, which can sometimes make us want to stop and go back. Today, I look back at my journey at UPR with fondness, and am eager for the start of another.