Because of the competitive nature of modern society, more and more people are applying to colleges all over the world. Whether you attend a prestigious university, such as Harvard or Cambridge, state school or community college, college offers students an opportunity to grow as an individual.

Often times, the college experience is challenging, from tough professors and difficult exams to the pressure of succeeding academically and developing a social circle. Nevertheless, the newfound freedom that college grants students allows them to learn how to become mature adults, and it can teach valuable life lessons both inside and outside the classroom. When I was still an undergraduate student, I learned one of the most important life skills necessary to live meaningfully: self-reliance.

When I started college, I experienced newfound freedom while also suffering from how to control such power. At first, college was daunting. I was taking difficult classes and not spending enough time finishing assignments and studying for exams, and I was struggling to make new friends. I found myself angry, lonely, depressed, and even gained the infamous “Freshman 15” during my first year. My second year was even more of a challenge and I also gained the “Sophomore 20.”

I eventually took an American Literature class where I read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, Self-Reliance, which I found to be quite enlightening.

In his essay, Emerson wrote “Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will.” This was an important passage that caught my attention. Was I unhappy because I was not self-reliant? Did I lack the willpower to rely on myself to make the choices in life necessary for my own contentment?

I decided to reevaluate my life and the choices I was making in an attempt to take control and become more self-reliant. I was unhappy with my recent weight gain and unhealthy diet. I started looking into the matter and read about the idea of having only one body and taking the time to treat it appropriately. Well, my first two years of college consisted of poor eating habits, which included an unhealthy obsession with McDonald’s, and hardly any physical activity. So I decided to make some changes.

During my third year in college, I truly started to blossom as a self-reliant adult. I learned about nutrition and exercise in a health class that I took, and I began to incorporate that knowledge into my daily life by avoiding fast food and drinking green tea instead of sugary beverages. I also tried to increase my activity. By the time that I graduated with my Bachelor of Arts in English a few years later, I had lost all the weight I gained in college and dropped another 15 pounds!

One of my literature professors taught me that the greatest joy of all is good health, and that wise professor definitely knew what she was talking about. But another aspect of my joy came from being self-reliant and seeing the results of the hard work and willpower required to achieve my goals of weight loss and a healthy lifestyle.

As I continued on my journey of self-reliance, I looked at an excerpt from Emerson’s essay, where he writes, “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.”

I took this to heart and tried to expand my own independent and critical thinking abilities. I took an argumentation and debate class as an elective, where my professor encouraged me to question the world around me.

This class helped me expand on my own self-reliance by debating ideas and forming my own opinions, such as what truth really is – or if truth even exists at all – and whether or not God exists. It was quite rewarding to discuss and scrutinize a wide variety of topics ranging from the fakeness of Hollywood to whether or not authority figures are the enemy in this current age that characterizes modernity. This class helped me learn more about the subjective nature of reality, and that I ultimately needed to rely on myself and develop my own understanding and opinions about the world.

College can be a defining experience in a person’s life that has a significant impact on his or her future. I found the experience to be incredibly challenging, yet incredibly rewarding. I personally faced moments where I considered dropping out because of my struggles with the stress of succeeding and finding my own path. Instead, I learned to persevere and become self-reliant, which resulted in figuring out how to eat properly and take care of my health, manage my time, succeed in my classes, fulfill personal obligations, and do whatever I had to in order to survive.

Becoming self-reliant was one of the hardest skills that I had to develop in my lifetime, but it is invaluable as I navigate life as an adult. Being a college student allowed me to learn that lesson and figure out how to apply it to my everyday life.

I find that I have gained new strength in the face of adversity and a renewed ability to rely on myself to achieve my goals. I still have a lot of learning and growing to do, but I am a lot more confident as I continue on my life journey now that I’m a self-reliant individual.

As Emerson wrote, “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself,” and that was indeed a lesson that I learned about being self-reliant.