"You’ve been asked to speak at your high school alma mater — about the path of life. (Whoa.) Draft the speech."

It's hard to think that it's been less than a year since I graduated; it seems like its been so much longer than that. When I got out of high school, my mindset and perspective of the world was so much different than it is now. I thought I was going to get really high grades in college, keep my job at the bookstore and be with my (at the time) boyfriend forever.

None of that was right. Not one bit of it.

Today I'm single, struggling to make C's in my classes and working at the school newspaper for a lot less than I was at the bookstore. As bad as all of that sounds though, I wouldn't give up or change anything that I've done this semester. I've made all of these choices that I have to live with, and it's amazing to me how everything I've done has come together.

I'm telling you all of this not to scare you, because it's not just depressing or morbid things that have happened to me this year.

I moved up from a correspondent on the paper to a paid assistant news editor. I've had dinner with the President of the university, as well as the Provost and the Dean of my college. I've been nominated for a Hearst award, and I'm being awarded a scholarship next week that I thought I had no shot at receiving.

The amount of people I've met at school has shaped my life in infinite ways. I've developed romantic feelings for some, and learned to steer clear of others. I've made best friends that I hope will stand by me for years to come. Sometimes we've clashed and problems have come up, but that hasn't stopped us from coming back together and making up.

It's the people that are willing to work things out and make an effort to keep you in their life that are worth keeping in yours.

The path in life is complicated. Simple as that. But it is also beautiful, enlightening, exciting and gratifying at the same time. To see what you want out of your life come true, you have to really go for it and settle for nothing less. I can't even begin to tell you how much I've experienced this semester because I went for it, and I told the doubts that I had inside of me to just keep going.

I hope that you all will do the same things for yourselves.

Don't settle for what other people tell you that you can accomplish. Challenge them, and surprise them when you went just a little bit further than they said you could. You'll be impressed with what you accomplish when you set goals and expectations for yourself, and you make a plan to execute those goals and expectations.

Sit back and imagine where you want to be when you graduate. While I can't guarantee that you'll get there right away, the vision will guide you as you continue with your academic and professional careers. Those without direction aren't entirely lost, but once they find that direction it'll make life so much more exciting for them. You can have that too.

So today, I challenge you to think about what you want out of life. Make a bucket list, map out your next ten years and maybe even daydream a little. No idea is too crazy as long as you believe in it.

You can either give in, give up or give life everything you've got.

"You have to learn a new skill. Do you prefer to read about it, watch someone else do it, hear someone describe it, or try it yourself?"

I think a combination of all of these elements would create a good foundation for the skills that you have to learn. When I'm learning something, it's best for me to start by reading about it, so that I get all of the background information and actually understand what is being talked about by others when I watch them doing it and talking about it. Then I have to try it myself to really experience it and understand it fully.

One step that I like to take to learn a new skill that wasn't mentioned is that I like to teach others after I have learned a new skill. It helps solidify the concepts for me, and it helps to make it easier to remember when I have to explain what I'm doing and why multiple times. When I'm coaching writers at work, I like to do this a lot. It's not enough for me to know why I make changes to stories, but I have to be able to explain it to the writer so they understand it, and will remember why the changes were made for their next story.

Blogging for me is that time away from everything else that's going on: classes, work, interning, my (attempt at a) social life, etc. It's time for me to write my thoughts out, and try to get a sense of all of the crazy things that have happened to me since the day I moved into my dorm last August.

To me, blogging is me expressing myself in anyway I can think of, even if it's simply by writing a couple of paragraphs in between classes. I'm always looking for something new to write about. I think I spend more time in my classes free-writing than I do paying attention or doing any productive note-taking. I need to work on that, but anytime I get a notebook in front of me, it just happens.

You can talk about anything you want to in a blog, even if it's random topics off of Plinky as I choose to do. Sometimes it takes a topic to get started, but where you end up in your writing can be completely off track from where you started.