May 1 has now come and gone, and for the majority of seniors, this day means everything. This day is the final day to commit to a university.

Now there is no switching allegiances unless we want to deal with outrageous fees and intolerable visits to various help desks. It is the day our futures, or the next year of our lives at the very least, are set in stone.

One of the main fears we share as we head off to college is leaving families and friends behind. For most students at Athens Drive, they will still live relatively close to their family homes, going to universities ranging from ten minutes to five hours away by car. Five hours is not too close, but the distance does not eliminate the possibility of driving home for a weekend.

However, there is a small group of us who are going ten or more hours away. A weekend trip home means buying an airplane ticket. On top of our pre-existing fears of going to university, we now have the fear of not even being able to drop in on our families whenever we feel homesick unless we want to also drop a lot of money as well.

So why do we choose universities that are so far away? Why do we move away from our families and friends, knowing we will only see them in person for winter, spring and summer vacations?

For myself, it was a combination of wanting a totally new beginning and a more metropolitan city, on top of my love for the country that I grew up visiting: Canada. My parents kept telling me that, no matter where I went, college would be a new beginning. The only problem with their claim was, to me, going anywhere in North Carolina simply was not enough. I did not want to chance running into a single person who brought up negative memories of my time in high school.

In addition, most of the universities here in North Carolina and the towns those schools are in were not interesting or diverse enough for my standards. I love the vast population of trees and flowers here, the independently owned coffee shops, and how close I live to the mountains, but Montreal has all of that and more. The bustling French-Canadian city has many kinds of flora, festivals for anything and everything, delicious and diverse restaurants, wonderfully kitschy shops and, of course, more.

The campus of my future school, McGill, even ascends a mountain, and its buildings are a dream come true for an art history nerd like me in which to attend class. The perfection that is Montreal, plus the family I have in Ottawa only a two hour train ride away, make heading far away from the place I have called home for ten years much more exciting than scary. In my eyes, I am simply leaving the place I grew up in and starting a life in a new, better place to call home.