top-universities

I always saw college as a really huge daunting task.  Throughout high school I thought that when I got to college it would be this big, rude, awakening.  In high school my parents moved so I could go to one of the top elementary schools in the country.  From there we moved again so I could go to a great college prep school that was basically, looking back, college without all of the monstrous loans.  When I was a senior I looked around for all of the schools that offered music education and which ones were the best.  I finally decided on coming here and the summer before classes started, I was sweating bullets.  It could of been the heat, or it could have been the shear terror I felt at the thought of having done so well in school and then getting to college where I fail out in the first week.  This was the vision I would play out in my head just about ever single day for the whole summer.  When the first day of classes finally came I thought I might even pass out in the middle of my first class out of a state of pure stress.  But as the day went on, and then the week passed, and then the first month passed and I was at the top of my class, I stopped one day in the middle of doing my homework.  I finally realized that all of the work I had done since I was a little girl, had paid off and now I was breezing through the most difficult music program in the country.  Where I had thought that this would be the most difficult thing I would ever do, I realized that this was complete cake compared to the all the top elementary schools, the prep schools, the summer schools, the science camps, and all the rest.  It was probably the most comforted I had been in my life up until that point.  From then on I still worked just as hard, but I didn't have a worry in the world because I had something I had never had before, confidence.