Although my days of overplaying my Beach Boys albums are over, whenever I happen to catch California Girls, I completely ignore that Mike Love wishes all girls were cute, tan Californian girls. Instead, I take pride in my geographical origin and grin at "The northern girls with they way they kiss, they keep their boyfriends warm at night."

I have lived in the state of New York my whole life, and although I often joke that I went south for school, Penn State, with its copious amounts of colorful trees surrounding old collegiate buildings, couldn't possibly exude the northern university feel any more.

But this summer, an internship required me to put my ethnocentric qualities aside as I forged past the Mason-Dixon Line.

Before trying out for my internship program, I knew that I could be placed at a newspaper in any part of the country. Call me optimistic, but I was dreaming of copy editing at a newspaper near the sandy beaches of California or living right in the middle of the hustle and bustle of New York City. But the copy-editing gods had a different idea -- Southwestern Virginia.

I lived more than four hours from the beach and just as far from Washington, D.C. The city I lived in, Roanoke, is just a few miles short of North Carolina and its citizens spoke with an accent I couldn't even fake if I tried. People there automatically knew I was a northerner -- with my loud, fast talking and an inability to fit "y'all" into every conversation.

My first southern lesson was learned the hard way. I found out that Virginians take life at a much slower pace, especially while driving. A Virginia State trooper must have been salivating at the sight of this northern driver who was speeding down U.S. Route 81 on her way to move to Roanoke. I was slapped with a big ol' Virginian reckless driving ticket, and I had only been in the state for three hours.

After that lovely welcoming present, I was even more skeptical of the place that I would call my home for the next several months. But the more I saw of the area, the less ignorant of the South I became.

Confederate flags meant more about people's love for their area than wanting pre-Civil War life back.

I had never tried grits -- now I'm searching State College high and low for a place than can fix my grit-deprivation. And it would be impossible to find a restaurant in town that has fried chicken as good as what I had this summer.

I was transformed from an iced tea lover to an adamant sweet tea drinker, which was everywhere in Virginia, even McDonald's. I never saw a tobacco field before, and then I was inundated with them.

I lived near the Appalachian Trail -- which is gorgeous, and a hike or drive on the mountains will take away any of the "Appalachia" stereotypes many northerners conjure.

Yes, I was surprised at how many of my co-workers went to church (there seemed to be more churches than people in the city), and a lot of the people I worked with were conservative -- which was a change from the newsroom atmosphere up here. I learned to not automatically organize people into distinct categories.

I learned that people with southern accents aren't automatically unintelligent. Virginia taught me how to be genuinely nice to people -- cashiers, mail carriers and other everyday people I came in contact with were truly helpful and generous. The culture also showed me how to be more laid back and less stressful. Most of all, my time in Virginia showed me that I shouldn't be ignorant of places I have never experienced -- every place has something to offer.

And now, y'all can here me proudly sing along to another line in my favorite Beach Boys song: "And the southern girls with the way they talk, they knock me out when I'm down there."