An ongoing series about why and how I persisted in college
When I left my home state of Michigan for a college 4 hours away in Muncie, Indiana, I began what Levinson (1977) would term the Early Adult Transition Period. Leaving my small one-stoplight town to head off on my own while my closest friends attended colleges in Michigan, scary as it was, truly felt like the moment I would begin defining myself. Coming from a small town and a graduating class of 100, I remember feeling a sense of freedom as I started college. I frequently thought nobody knows me here (in a good way). I can be whoever I want. Reinvent myself. I tried out for the university softball team (didn’t make it). Attended various clubs on campus (didn’t stick to most). The point was, I tried to discover if there was more to me than my high school self.
However, not being known can also come with loneliness. So while I loved the fact that I stepped into a new world without other preconceived ideas about me, I also struggled with depression and loneliness. I left high school as a party girl and wanted to make a change in college. By my senior year of high school, partying every weekend felt empty and hollow. I was searching for something more meaningful and was having a hard time finding it as I stumbled my way around college parties. Renn and Reason (2021) point out how students enter college with a mixture of “attitudes, beliefs, expectations, and motivations that influence how they experience college” (p. 16) and this was certainly true for me. I had beliefs I wouldn’t find friends and love unless I was the fun party girl—even though she was no longer who I wanted to be. I can remember sitting on top of the wobbly wooden loft my dad built for me on move-in day a couple of weeks before and talking to my mom on the phone about not fitting in. She very succinctly said, “Go to church.”
We were not overly religious growing up. My mom grew up Unitarian, and my dad grew up Catholic, and as a family, we grew up Lutheran. My view of God consisted of a list of checks and balances in my mind. It was a simple and mostly sweet relationship, as I was never overly concerned by whether I was good enough or loved by God. I happened to meet some students from a Christian ministry at the university activity fair the week before. With my mom’s advice still strong in my mind, I woke up the next Sunday morning and went to church. This season of life is honestly difficult for me to write. I went to church that day. I felt accepted and loved and became actively involved. It seemed I had found my people. But in the process, I lost the chance to truly find myself. The church I was involved with had extreme evangelical roots preaching a very black and white doctrine. It was all-encompassing. As someone who likes to know the rules and who tended to see things as black and white, I fell right into it. It felt structured and safe. The checks and balances I lived by in my tweens and teens were now clearly defined. Ironically where grace was preached often in this church, and while I had a testimony that shared it wasn’t my good deeds that saved me but by God’s grace, through faith, alone (New International Version Bible, 2011, Ephesians 2:8-9), there was a lot of right and wrong, good and bad, which felt an awful lot like works.
I share this because this Christian ministry was the single most significant influence in my life that led to persistence throughout college. It affected the career I pursued, the classes I chose—my priorities. And while all that sounds cringeworthy, the confusing part for me is it wasn’t all bad. That’s one reason it’s hard to write about. I have conflicted emotions over it. I met my husband and some of my closest friends during this time (who are still some of my closest friends 20 years later—we’ve all had our own wounds to work through). I grew in leadership skills as I led small group discussions. I stepped out of my comfort zone, speaking to strangers more times than I can count. And not just for the church. My involvement with the church made me more confident in other areas of life. I was a Red Squad leader for Ball State helping freshmen navigate their first weekend on campus. I worked at the front desk of my dorm from my sophomore through my senior year. I can’t disregard all of that. But the negative impact it had on my life has been hard to shake through the years. There was an overarching theme that implied working for a campus ministry full-time was more “spiritual” than finding a job out in the world. So while I loved my major, I often felt like it was the wrong thing to pursue and enjoy. You can see how messed up that way of thinking was. Unfortunately, adult mentors with strong opinions influencing my life made it difficult for me to see otherwise. On top of that, the faculty advisor for my journalism graphics program was limited in her view of what I could do with my major after graduation and gave me poor advice. She told me the “creative” jobs were for the graphic design fine art majors, not the journalism graphics majors. It pushed on an insecurity of mine about being a creative person, but thankfully I didn’t let her opinions or the church leadership’s opinions hold me back from what I wanted to do. I graduated with a degree in journalism graphics and worked many years as a graphic designer before teaching myself photography and starting my own photography business. Looking back, my natural instinct took over to persist and prove wrong those who told me what I couldn’t do.
Read on: Persistence 1 • Persistence 3
References
Levinson D. J. (1977). The mid-life transition: a period in adult psychosocial
development. Psychiatry, 40(2), 99–112.
New International Version. (2011). BibleGateway.com.
www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians%202:8-9&version=NIV
Renn, C. A. & Reason, R. D. (2021). Characteristics of college students in the United States. College students in the United States: Characteristics, experiences, and outcomes (2nd ed., pp. 3-22). Stylus.
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