As I sat through Mrs. Murphy’s presentations of the International Baccalaureate (IB) program my sophomore year, I kept picturing all the colleges I would be able to go with IB on my resume. I was picturing myself at Dartmouth, or at Northwestern or Georgetown. Attending the University of Kansas (KU) never crossed my mind during that presentation, but two years later, I can’t picture myself anywhere else.
When I started looking at colleges my junior year, I was only looking at out of state, liberal arts schools. As a member of the IB program, I believed that I needed to go to a small, prestigious school because it seemed like all the graduated students of the program ended up at a school like that. I felt the indirect pressure of my peers, teachers and past students bearing down on me, telling me to uphold the prestige of the IB program. And it wasn’t just IB that I was feeling pressure from — it seemed like the entire senior class wanted to get out of Kansas.
At the end of my last summer as a high school student, I started intensively researching for colleges. During the school year, I would procrastinate doing my homework for a couple hours by researching colleges after school. Each time I logged onto College Board, I felt the nagging pressure of going anywhere but a state school. I thought that I would be a disappointment to my family, friends and teachers by not 
going to a prestigious school. I believed that I would just be wasting the past two years of the IB program by going to a state school. I had invested so much time and hard work into the program (I haven’t watched “The Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” in weeks) and I wanted to see the results in the college I would go to.
I had applied to KU in the summer, not really thinking of it as anything more than a back up while researching other colleges. As people around me began to find their perfect college, I became more frustrated with myself and started to see KU as a more viable option. I had sent in a portfolio to the School of Design in February, 10 minutes before the post office closed and found out that I had been one of 40 students accepted into the program.
After I received that acceptance letter, parts of the college puzzle started to come together. One random weekend in February, my aunt from Dallas called me about her friend’s daughter who was wanting to go to KU. The daughter, Lowrie, was in town and wanted to know if I wanted to meet up to get coffee. By the end of the meeting, I had found a roommate if I ended up going to KU. I started to research more about the design school and was blown away by the types of design that is created by the students. All these things helped me look past the barriers that I had set upon myself.
It wasn’t until March that I decide to attend KU, but coming to that decision was hard. It was hard to let myself want to go to KU. I signed up for the IB program not only for its academics but also the fact that it looks good on college applications. Why did I work so hard for the past two years only to make the decision to go to a state school?
I had that question stuck in my head for a little bit, but then I realized that IB had ended up holding me back in my college process. I gave into the thoughts that everyone goes to KU, it’s just like a bigger East and that it’s just a major party school. I had tried to convince myself that I would be happy at a small school, but I was only kidding myself. I want to go to KU. I can’t wait to be taking classes in the design school and business school. I want to spend my weekends cheering on the basketball team at Allen Fieldhouse and exploring downtown Lawrence.
Just because I’m not going to a small liberal arts school or a selective school doesn’t mean that IB wasn’t meaningful. I am going to take whatever I learn in IB with me regardless of where I go to school. Going to a state school doesn’t mean that I’ll never use anything I learned in IB during college.
I’ll take with me the ability to analyze Irish poems or key passages with magical realism in it with me to college. I’ll be able to write 15+ page papers, even if they are about math or biology. I’ll be able to look at things beyond my schema and think at a higher critical level. I’ll take the memories of arguing over Christ figures in novels in English, joking about Zimbardo in Psychology and getting Murph’d. I’ll cherish winning the can drive competition between Mrs. Horn’s and Mrs. Goodeyon’s math classes two years in a row and crashing the parties junior IB throws with Fishman. I got so much more out of IB than I ever thought I would get out of it, and I have all the students and teachers who are a part of the IB program to thank. All my fellow IB seniors have become my best friends and classes next year will be unnatural without them.
For me, the IB program was completely worth the hard work. I’ve achieved some of my proudest accomplishments through the program and I would be a different person without it. Even though I’ll be leaving the program in a couple weeks, I’ll be taking everything I learned with me to college. KU wasn’t the glamorous Ivy League school I first pictured myself attending when I signed up for the IB program, but I’m completely fine with that.
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