While I was finishing up my final year of high school and looking forward to starting college, I worried a lot about the difficulty level of my future college classes. High school was, for the most part, a breeze, and I never had to worry too much about having a hard time in my classes. What if I get to college and do badly my first year, because I don’t know what it’s like to be challenged in my academics, I remember thinking. In March of 2016 I had an opportunity to spend some time with some Honors students at Longwood, and talk to them about their experiences at Longwood thus far. I asked one of them, “is the work that you have to do for your classes now a lot harder than what you remember from high school?” She replied, “it’s not that it’s harder…it’s just a different kind of work.” Now that I have completed my first year, I can certainly attest to what she said. Since being at Longwood, I have been able to take classes that have been unlike other classes that were offered in high school. In these classes, the work assigned to me outside of class was challenging, but certainly within the scope of what I was able to do. The projects I worked on and the discussions had in class made me realize that I am able to learn in ways that I did not realize I was capable of. I was thinking more deeply about topics that I had always thought were not in my interest. These experiences sum up what scholarship means to me: always finding ways to push what you think are your intellectual boundaries, and finding new interests through that process. I have always felt like it is easier to learn about a topic when you enjoy it. Learning in a different way than I had been exposed to before college helped me enjoy learning during and outside of class and aided in my academic success for this first year.