Being a child of a military family implies an upbringing that people tend to misunderstand. Military family life is strange in the sense that it makes you somewhat of a nomad; you grow up somewhere, often many different places, where your family has no connection. There’s no roots tying you to the town you live in, or the school you go to. I was very lucky in that my family did not have to move around much. I was even luckier to be born and raised in the rocky mountains of Colorado.

Still, we were a vagabond family since none of us really belonged in the town we lived in. My parents would not have even stepped foot there had it not been for the Air Force telling them to. My dad would’ve never strayed away from his hometown in Arkansas, my mom would’ve never left Massachusetts, they would’ve never met, and I would’ve never been born. It’s weird to say that I owe my existence to Uncle Sam, but it’s true.

By my senior year of high school, everyone else in my family had left Colorado. Everyone else moved back across the country as they fulfilled their service. “There’s nothing for me here,” I remember my dad telling me once, before he moved away. He was right, and I couldn’t really blame him. I lived in an apartment that year, but I knew I had to figure something more sustainable out.

For the longest time I had no plans to go to college; I didn’t have amazing grades or AP credits or anything like that. College sounded like nothing more than a waste of time to me, so I just started working at restaurants. 3 months as a server at Bonefish Grill was all it took to make me realize I wanted to go to get my bachelor's. So, I sent out some applications, and despite a lot of rejections, UGA gave me a chance.