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.