The moment it was out of my mouth, everything seemed to stop completely, except for Mrs. Moore’s eyes, which grew progressively bigger.

“Where?”

I could feel my best friend suck in her breath beside me as her mother stared, mouth agape.

“Indiana,” I said again.

Mrs. Moore’s eyebrows began a hesitant crawl to the middle of her forehead, where they finally perched, twin question marks already asking her next question.

“Why?”

Now this was tricky. Why indeed? I quickly considered a host of possible answers, all of them perfectly reasonable: I wanted to go to a big school, Indiana University had lots of great departments and programs, it would be good for me to move out of San Diego…

My head was brimming over with answers, but they were frustratingly slow making their way out of my mouth. Mistaking my silence for doubt, Mrs. Moore took the opportunity to intervene.

“Erin,” she said, leaning toward me over her kitchen table, “there’s still time.”

She grabbed my hand and launched into what I imagine was meant to be a pep-talk. I unproductively sprinkled her speech about the Ivy League and my creativity and being better than a public university and what about Brown with “Yes, buts” and “No, buts.” Finally she exhausted her own list of reasons and I left her house, head spinning but one thought firmly in place: I wanted to move as far away as possible from people like her.

What she said probably shouldn’t have surprised me. I spent my four high school years having my head crammed with typical prep school rhetoric. Most of my friends bought into the idea that a prestigious private college; a lucrative career as a doctor, lawyer, or businessperson; and a big house with a spouse and 2.5 kids made up exactly the kind of life they should hope for.

I knew I wanted something different.

So it was with stubborn pride that I watched my classmates scatter over the East Coast and nestle into life at tiny colleges and top-tier universities. And it was with a heart full of excitement and a stomach full of nerves that I boarded a plane bound for what seemed to everyone but me to be the unlikeliest of college destinations.

I won’t lie to you: I was scared shitless. I knew absolutely no one at I.U. I had never set foot on the campus that was to be my home for the next four years. I spent the first night in my broom-closet dorm room sweating in the late-August Midwestern heat, listening to the chorus of crickets and cicadas and the lonely call of a train whistle, wondering if this was going to work out, if I would find my way in a sea of 34,999 other students. Frankly, I felt a bit like a pet shop gold fish that suddenly finds itself set loose in the middle of the ocean.

So I swam. And I kept swimming and I kept swimming and I kept swimming.

I didn’t always know the way. I fell on my ass quite a few times (and I don’t just mean that figuratively – Indiana ice is a difficult thing for a Californian). I spent tearful nights on the phone with my mom; sometimes felt dulled by the slow tempo of Midwestern life; found the radical politics of my anarchist-vegan dorm mates confounding at best, downright scary at worst; and I never did become the Hoosier basketball superfan every Indiana undergrad is expected to be.

No, I didn’t always know the way. And that was okay, because I made my own. My life in college was full of good literature, strange classes on everything from human reproduction to Wagnerian opera, and plenty of music. It was populated by the oddest and most dynamic of characters. There was Jolita Washington, who spent at least an hour every day jumping on the miniature trampoline she had wheeled into her dorm room. And Matt Kocher, the vegan activist who smelled like vanilla soy milk and sat on the floor of my room telling me Bulgarian folk tales. And the boys in my band, who brought me tall boys of PBR and encouraged me to rock out in ways my childhood piano teacher never had. And Murray Sperber, the hippie lit professor who told me stories of Ginsberg chanting to his dog in Vietnam-era Berkeley and worried over the effect a future in academia would have on my spirit. His advice at graduation stays with me still: “Never predict your own future," he said. "The gods will hear you and bite you in the ass.”

Good advice. But I’d like to add something else: Don’t let anyone predict your future for you either. If you have a good feeling, a strong conviction, an urge to step off the straight and narrow path and see what lies beyond the big houses and the comfortable careers, don’t just step off – jump in feet first, screaming and laughing straight into the great unknown. You just might find exactly what you didn’t know you were looking for. -- Erin Cory