Oftentimes when I tell people what school I am attending next year, I am met with a generic smile with nothing behind it but vague confusion. Next year I will be attending University of Northern Iowa, and I am the only student from LHS going there. UNI is by no means a name-brand school; it doesn’t require an amazing ACT or GPA to get in, and not many people from LHS even apply in a given year.

For me, UNI is perfect. I will be majoring in elementary education, and UNI has a wonderful history as the Iowa Teachers College, allowing me to have endless opportunities to work in classrooms my freshman year, and even study abroad.

Going to a school populated with kids from LHS isn’t what bothered me about committing to a well-known school. For years, the most popular colleges were all I was exposed to, so that’s where I started my search. I quickly tore through those options, since I realized that big schools easily overwhelmed me and small schools felt stifling. Finding a mid-sized school in the Midwest was hard enough, but since my dad is in the Army, I receive in-state tuition at any public university in the U.S.; I narrowed my search further to include only public schools.

One day I came home and my mom had UNI’s webpage pulled up; I immediately reacted somewhere along the lines of “ew, Iowa,” but the more I looked into it, the more I liked it. I suppose it just goes to show that you can’t limit yourself based on what everyone else is doing.

I made my college decision over the summer. In fact, I was admitted to UNI on July 1, 2016,, and I was committed before school started in August. This was exactly what I wanted: to know where I was going before senior year even started. In the fall, I visited UNI for a second time and fell in love with the school all over again.

Too many students at LHS feel pressured to apply to schools with prestigious names that cost a small fortune in tuition alone, but that path isn’t right for everyone. It’s too much to expect that all 500 or so graduates in the senior class want to pursue the same type of education at the same type of school and graduate with the same type of degree. We are all from the same place, yes, but we are not all the same person.

I am proud of the fact that I will be the only LHS alumni attending UNI. I love the school, and I believe that more LHS students should look at schools that aren’t “name-brand” and that don’t receive dozens of LHS applications a year. Although these schools may not be what LHS sees as an ideal school, the important thing is to find a school that is ideal for the individual.

“So, you’re going to Oberlin, right?” The words hit me a little harder than they should have, or than I expected them to.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go there — or maybe I really didn’t. I just found myself assaulted by the pressure to make everything right. Check all the boxes. Please everyone.

It was overwhelming.

With the other trombonists from my music school deciding between Oberlin and Eastman, I worried that denying myself the opportunities that they were pursuing at prestigious music schools would somehow ruin me. But I wasn’t them.

Let’s backtrack a bit.

As a lost junior, I had my mind set on majoring in journalism one year ago. With no tangible experience in journalism, I joined DOI, at which point I realized that I was more interested in an English major than one in journalism and — oh, also by the way — I love trombone far too much not to pursue it as a minor. Briefly stuck on majoring in music education before taking another turn, I went from potential journalist to aspiring educator before finally deciding that I would be happiest in a five-year dual degree program in trombone performance and biochemistry. And no, that isn’t changing again anytime soon.

Juggling the ordinary college application process with all of the additional auditions and procedures that my music performance degree posed, I also faced the pressures presented by each side. Upon my admission to Oberlin, which has great programs on both ends, I started feeling like I needed to go there.

With peers at my music school focusing only on music and peers at LHS focusing only on academics, I felt like I needed to make both sides of my degree perfect. With Oberlin checking all the boxes on paper, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to explain not going there to anyone.

However, after committing to Lawrence University — which is both less selective and has a less renowned conservatory than Oberlin — I could not be happier with my decision. Choosing a college is a decision that you make for your life. The next four years (or five, in my case) of your life are going to be spent somewhere, and it’s up to you to decide where that somewhere is. Making a decision that is important and personal shouldn’t be determined by what you think other people will think, nor should it be based off of a list of colleges that someone came up with for you. Just choose for you.