We leave high school and we have a grand image of college in our heads: it’s the place we’ll be free in, the place we’ll experiment at. We picture dormitories and lecture halls and late-night boozing (or at least, if you’re like me, you surely did). But my college experience, which was all of the above and more, wound up far different than I could have known to expect. My college experience was cut short; I left Northwestern halfway through my junior year.

I’m 22 and I’m class of 2016. This June I’ll don my cap and gown, walk across the stage and pose for photos with my fellow classmates. But it will be a trip and a return to Northwestern University for me. I haven’t lived in Evanston or taken a class on campus since March 2015, when I was 20 years old.

My Northwestern departure was an acceleration to completing school. I had it planned out; I was excited for it. I’d be done early with the endless readings, deadlines and exams, done with those classes taken for requirements but not passion, done with those university social structures I had so come to loathe. Instead I’d have a year of traveling and adventures, after two decades of predictability within an hour radius of Chicago. Remembering what it was like when all of my high school friends left for college a month before me, I assured myself that it’s far easier to leave than be left behind.

And so, for a variety of personal and professional reasons, I left. I simply left. I moved to New York in March 2015 for my journalism residency. I worked in Rockefeller Plaza, salsa danced at the United Nations and spent my evenings writing in Bryant Park. In June I moved to Austin, Texas, a city I fell in love with (and a city to which I’d still love to return). I told stories that matter, I foraged through data, I ate more tacos than I could have imagined and formed friendships with colleagues I admired. Then, at the end of August, I flew to Paris for study abroad in my last quarter of college. I improved my French, traveled until I was broke, fell in love with goat cheese and experienced the utter desolation that came with a terrorist attack.

I learned and I experimented, just like I had planned. I had an adventure, I had a college experience like no one else I knew.

But then I was done. And I was lost. I came back to America graduated and clueless. I didn’t have a place at Northwestern to return to, and I found myself loathing the money, the credits, the time and the ambition that led me to leaving and graduating Northwestern so early.

---

Luckily, I grew up in the Chicago suburbs. So I interned at the Chicago Tribune, I lived at home, I searched for jobs and I visited Evanston every weekend, laughing with friends I’d been missing for a year, and crashing on couches that came to expect me quite often. I got back those little tastes of college I’d abandoned. It wasn’t the same, but it was something.

I don’t regret leaving Northwestern so early. Or at least, there are very logical reasons for telling myself that it was the right thing to do. It saved me money when I’m already bogged down with loans. My JR in New York got me the job I have now. If I hadn’t studied abroad senior year, I wouldn’t have met my boyfriend junior year. If I hadn’t studied abroad senior year, I wouldn’t have experienced a historical event that will give me perspective for decades to come.

I didn’t have the normal college experience. But when I look back on how I’ve grown and what I’ve gained, I feel like a typical college student once again. Whether it’s on campus or abroad, we take risks, we learn and we experiment. We meet people from backgrounds different than our own, we see things we’d never heard of before. We’re challenged to question our beliefs, our passions, our motivations and our assumptions. We break our mold, no matter if we’re abroad or not.

College didn’t turn out to be that grand image I’d held in my head. But that’s okay. College was the friendships, the adventures, the conversations and ideas that kept me determined to learn, grow and experiment. College didn’t end just because I left it.