My dad is a Penn State alumnus.

So although I could "go wherever I wanted," Penn State was strongly encouraged.

After getting my acceptance letter in the mail, my family immediately decided to make the trek from Alabama to go visit.

I remember thinking, "OK, I'll go visit, but I am not going to attend Penn State."

At the time, I was planning on going to Boston University.

But, there was something cohesiveabout Penn State that was big and exciting, which was different from where I came from.

After spending a weekend here I thought, "This is what college is supposed to be like."

When I told my friends about it they just gave me blank stares.

Who from Alabama goes to Penn State?

Well, I did apparently, and I've never once regretted it.

I remember my first football game as a freshman, which happened to be against the University of Miami.

We got killed, but I stayed the whole game even though most students left during half time when we had already lost.

Ironically, I later ended up missing the end of the game when Joe Paterno beat Paul "Bear" Bryant's record.

My high school was small and we didn't even have a football team, so the excitement of a football game in Beaver Stadium, even when we were losing, wasn't lost on me.

And when I say my high school was small, I mean I graduated with 55 people in my class.

That being said, coming to a school of more than 40,000 undergraduates was pretty intimidating.

What seemed so big now seems small compared to the looming real world ahead of me.

Needless to say, I've learned a lot in my years here.

For instance, I've made some of the best mistakes of my life in college.

I started out planning to be a marketing major and after lowering my GPA several times with calculus, economics and computer science classes, I realized that maybe it wasn't for me.

Luckily I figured that out and switched to English and French.

My second best mistake was trying out for Lion Ambassadors, something though prestigious, is not my personality.

I made it to the interview and well ... they didn't seem to think it was my style either. I then tried out for the Collegian and here I am already writing my senior column.

It turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me, particularly career-wise.

I've made a lot of bad memories here and a lot of good ones and they are all worth remembering, because I've learned from every one of them.

Before coming to college, I was never one step outside my comfort zone very often.

But the best advice I can give to anyone with graduation still in the distant future, is to take risks and take them all, because for me it has made all the difference.