BEFORE I start disseminating my "elderly advice," I first want to tell all of you congratulations. Congratulations on your acceptance into the University, and congratulations on taking your first steps into the next phase of your life. With high school behind you (a fact that I'm sure thrills some of you and saddens others), the next four (or five, or however many you wish to pursue) years will be among your best.
So now that I've given you the same clichés I'm sure you've already heard from teachers, parents, siblings, friends and other current college students, I suppose I'll move on to the actual substance of what I have to say.
Many of you will soon be going to your summer orientations (many of you have already gone). Then again, from your Aug. 28 move-in to your Sept. 1 start of classes, you'll have yet more orientations. At these orientations, you're bound to hear the same six words I heard over and over again at mine: "Step out of your comfort zone."
The first time I heard it, this phrase baffled me. "Why would I want to do that?" I thought to myself. I had always just thought that as long as one maintains an open mind, and a willingness to do some new things, things they'd be comfortable with, college would be great. So I did exactly what comes easiest to a new first year. I flat-out ignored the advice I was being given.
The way I figured it, my "comfort zone" was in many ways key to my self-defense. I planned to use this "zone" to help me keep the promises I'd made to myself before coming to college. My decision to not drink in college and to maintain my rather conservative personal moral and ethical values both relied heavily on the comfort zone I had built around myself. To me, stepping out of that zone would involve an inherent risk to those values I held dear.
Now, don't get me wrong. Staying within my comfort zone certainly didn't take away my more wild side and my willingness to take some risks. I, like any good college student, skip plenty of classes (at least one a week), do maybe 50 percent of the work I'm assigned and I'd really rather not get into how much money I lost in poker last year.
Or my driving
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