Defying Amish Norms to Pursue a Broader Education

As I write this, I want to pinch myself. It’s sometimes too much to grasp that I realized my lifelong dream of attending college. I was a long way from that dream when I was 14. I remember watching my younger siblings clamor into a station wagon to go to school. I couldn’t go with them because I’d just graduated eighth grade, marking what was meant to be the end of my education for the rest of my life. I’d longed to go back to school but the Amish ways wouldn’t bend to my will. Rather, my will had to bend to the Amish ways.

But in the fall of 2004, there I was at Smith. The thrill began with my very first class. The astronomy professor started with the image of a child sitting on a sandy beach with fistfuls of sand, saying there are more galaxies in the universe than there are grains of sand on earth, and that scientists don’t know whether the universe is finite or infinite. However, they do know that there are an infinite number of mysteries in the universe. I felt my mind expanding to absorb these incredible ideas.

Soon I was taking Ernie Alleva’s ethics class, in which we discussed Plato, one of my favorite philosophers. Alleva had an unassuming style of presenting issues that invited us to turn them around and examine them from all sides. I also enrolled in a beginning German course with Jocelyne Kolb and a Scandinavian mythology course with Craig Davis. 

Every one of those courses stimulated my mind even beyond what I’d imagined in a college setting. Different from my childhood education, a means of social discipline, Smith was an education of self-actualization that I’ll savor for the rest of my life.

This is just one of the many love stories we've received in conjunction with Smith's 150th. Submit your own using our love story submission form.