I 

have heard it all. About how there’s 
nothing in the world quite like 
walking to Michigan Stadium with 
your friends on game days — when jubi-
lant music floods the streets and Ann 
Arbor is indisputably wide awake. About 
hunching over crinkled papers and half-
finished lattes in the library late at night. 
About the fading intensity of homesick-
ness as you find the friends that’ll speak 
at your wedding someday and the growing 
sense of who you are meant to be.
With conviction and nostalgia, my 
teachers, neighbors and older friends 
promised, “It’ll be the best years of your 
life.”
The best years of my life.
As the first person in my family to 
attend college in the United States, I was 
both very impressionable and cautiously 
optimistic about college. However, as 
I stood on the steps of Angell Hall and 
read the words “the means of education 
shall forever be encouraged,” learned 
from professors who are nothing short of 
experts in their respective fields and pas-
sionately sang the fight song at my first 
home football game, I couldn’t help but 
believe those words. After all, how could 
it possibly get any better? It truly felt like 
I was on the brink of something extraor-
dinary.
However, my college experience large-
ly deviated from what my friends and 
teachers had recounted. There was an 
unexpected and acute loneliness that 
pulled at the hem of my jeans just about 
everywhere I went. After just a few weeks 
of walking to class, staring at my blank 
phone during rushed meals in the dining 
hall, and exchanging empty words with 
my roommate, I found myself reaching 
for my earbuds more and more often — 
not for the music, but simply to drown out 
that dreaded feeling of loneliness.
Like most freshmen, perhaps, I decided 
I needed to put myself out there and get 
out of my comfort zone if I wanted to 
meet people. So I sat down and scrolled 
through Maize Pages religiously to fill 
out countless applications for clubs. One, 
in particular, was for a pre-medicine fra-
ternity, founded on the pillars of service 
and leadership and on the passion for 
medicine.
The organization and its members 
embodied everything I wanted for my 
future. I pored myself over that applica-
tion — citing years of involvement in vari-
ous clubs from my high school career. I 
remember picking out my favorite yel-
low blouse, meticulously flat-ironing my 
unruly hair just to pull it back into a neat 
plait, and rehearsing exactly what I want-
ed say. But when my interviewers looked 
like they were trying to keep their heads 
from flopping over from boredom during 
my responses, I walked out of Angell Hall 

feeling more than defeated. Just a month 
earlier, I had stared up at the promising 
words at the top of that very building, 
filled with hope and enthusiasm.
And when the rejection finally came via 
email, it felt like a door was shutting right 
in my face — like an entire group of people 
told me I wasn’t enough. Alas, there I was 
again: trapped and pushed into a corner 
with my dear loneliness.
The rest of that first semester of col-
lege followed much of the same pattern. I 
desperately tried out for everything I was 
even remotely intrigued by. An Indian 
dance team, an a cappella singing group, 
more medical clubs. Each one responded 
with a resounding “no.”
I couldn’t help but feel confused. Of all 
the people that had told me about what 
college would be like, not one had men-
tioned feeling inadequate or alone. For 
a long time, I thought I must be the only 
person who felt this way. That miscon-
ception didn’t change until a close friend 
confided in me that she would feel the 
same way even after a night partying with 
a whole group of people. Slowly, I began to 
see how pervasive and typical these feel-
ings of loneliness and inadequacy really 
are, and a bigger picture began to unrav-
el. Now, I can’t help but feel obligated to 
speak to the gaping hole in the narrative 
I had heard about the college experience.
The best years of my life.
Though it may look different for each 
person, so many people experience this 
period of instability. After all, college is 
full of change, and the road 
to figuring out who you’re 
meant to be isn’t always 
glamorous. 
Self-discovery 
can be a ferociously grueling 
process that forces us to look 
our scariest inner demons in 
the eye.
I didn’t come to this real-
ization until I headed home 
for 
Winter 
Break. 
After 
a stressful round of final 
exams and nagging feelings 
of loneliness and inadequacy 
buzzing in my ear for the past 
few months, I was so grateful 
to be surrounded by my fam-
ily. When I finally opened up 
to my parents about how dif-
ficult my first semester was, 
my dad reminded me of a 
story I knew all too well.
When I was just 2 years 
old, my family moved to the 
United States from India. On 
my first day of kindergarten, 
I stared with wide eyes at 
my teachers and fellow stu-
dents — not comprehending 
a single word. My teacher 
actually met with my parents 

to express concern about my English 
language ability. Worried, my mother 
would sit with me each day as I forced 
my tongue to make strange new sounds 
and memorized the curves of a foreign 
alphabet. I remember being so frustrated 
that I would throw my pencil across the 
room — refusing to learn anymore. Ever 
so patiently, my mother would coax the 
pencil back into my hands and assure me 
that the language would come naturally 
to me soon because our ancestors in India 
were writers. She gently insisted I had the 
strength in me to thrive in this foreign 
place. Soon enough, I was spewing Eng-
lish as fluently as Samantha from next 
door — more naturally than my native 
Telugu, even.
By the time I got to middle school, I 
was writing poems and stories. With his 
crinkling brown eyes and graying hair, my 
dad offered, “You’re like Hanuman. You 
don’t know your own strength.” I smiled, 
remembering the ancient Hindu stories 
about a man that didn’t know he had the 
strength to lift mountains or the creative 
intelligence of an inventor unless some-
one told him so. 
My dad’s reminder of my own strength 
stuck with me. When I returned to cam-
pus for winter semester, I wrote his exact 
words on a piece of paper and stuck them 
to my dorm wall. I didn’t want to forget 
them. Most importantly, I wanted to live 
by them.
So, I was more kind to myself. I relished 
victories and failures alike, heeding that 

each would help me in some way. And even 
though I started to carve my own niche on 
campus, I told myself that I shouldn’t be 
afraid of not knowing where I fit in or not 
feeling like I am enough. I realized my 
dad was right. It is during the most trying 
of times that you discover your purpose 
and some of your greatest strengths — 
things you’ve always had within yourself.
Of course, success is all the more 
gratifying when you can appreciate and 
acknowledge every struggle that you 
fought to overcame. Thus, I choose to 
acknowledge the loneliness and confusion 
that colored much of my first semester. I 
know that somewhere in the future, I will 
be grateful for the challenges my fresh-
man year posed and how they pushed me 
to discover more about myself.
Already, I am at a point where the blar-
ing loneliness has quieted down and I am 
comfortable simply being with myself. I 
learned to enjoy my own company. It is 
this firm awareness and acceptance of the 
struggles embedded in the college experi-
ence that allowed me to embrace every 
extraordinary opportunity that college 
has to offer.
I wish more than anything that some-
one had told me, “You might feel alone 
and lost, and that’s OK. You are not alone. 
Treasure those experiences.” I am persis-
tently optimistic that this thread of truth 
can help stitch together a more realistic 
picture about the college experience and 
remind anyone who needs to hear it, “You 
are strong enough.”

Wednesday, April 17, 2019// The Statement
6B

BY YASHASVINI NANNAPURAJU, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR
Mending the college narrative

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

