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