College Signing Day Open Chat: Why do you go to your school?

Happy Signing Day! Thousands of kids around the nation today are going to be declaring which schools they plan on going to in the fall. SB Nation has partnered up with the White House in its Reach Higher campaign, which is an initiative that First Lady Michelle Obama has helped set up to encourage kids to go to school after already receiving a high school diploma.

You'll see a lot of college blogs share their stories about why some went to the schools that they did, so here's my super condensed story:

In my sophomore and junior years in high school, I started thinking about growing up and becoming a teacher. I liked helping out my classmates here and there, I started to look up to my teachers more and I figured educating would be a really gratifying career. Thinking locally when it came to picking my colleges senior year, my choices really ended up being Eastern Michigan, University of Michigan-Dearborn and Henry Ford Community College. The last two are only a 10-15 minute drive from my house. My dad did some looking around and found a work program at EMU where I'd work in one of the dining programs there part-time, go to school full-time and most of my room and board would be paid off. And since EMU was known for its School of Education, my decision was easily made to go there.

When I went off to school, I figured out early on I didn't trust my own maturity to make educating children an everyday thing for me. Maybe I really could've done very well at it, but I knew it wouldn't be worth sticking with if I was unsure about how I felt towards it. I took a Philosophy of Religion course my very first year on campus, where two of my papers received a B++ as a grade. That might've done something to me in the process but there's no proving it.

Eventually, I decided sports broadcasting would be something I'd have a passion for, so I decided to take classes more geared towards being an on-air radio talent until I eventually picked up sports writing as a hobby of mine. When I finally figured out the obvious maneuver to try and become a better writer instead, I joined The Eastern Echo, built up a few skills from that and then eventually joined Hustle Belt when Matt Sussman was our hall monitor.

I've worked a lot during college. Sports writing has obviously kept me extremely busy, but there was a point in my college life where I was working two jobs while blogging and doing an internship with a few local radio stations in Ann Arbor. I've worked a lot and it's been well worth it. While I was working at the dining program or at restaurants, washing busses, shuttling cars around a parking lot, renting out tuxedos, doing labor with tons and tons of steel in a hard hat, doing public works labor for my hometown, doing radio stuff, sports writing things, when I was doing two or more of these job all at once throughout college has really helped me grow into the person I am now.

The social experience, the education, the grind, it's all been extremely fantastic for me. Now that I'm all finished with school, I can say that that college was extremely beneficial to my growth during my undergrad and I'm excited to see what my college experiences can do for me in the future as an alumnus.

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If you've got a story to share, feel free to comment below to talk about why you went to the college you did go to, or even what college you plan on going to. You could also tweet out a picture of yourself wearing your college gear to @SBNation with the #ReachHigher hash tag to go along with it. And you don't have to only be a student or alum of a MAC school, we're talking about any sort of education taken after high school.