Growing up in Winnipeg, I always thought I would leave this wintery plain the moment I turned 18. University seemed like the kind of thing you had to move away from Winnipeg for, to have a good experience like you see in the movies. I had visited other universities around Winnipeg and had seen the thousands of students rushing around the overwhelmingly large and at times not-so-aesthetically-pleasing campuses, running to catch busses in the freezing cold. I thought, “Yeah, I might take my business elsewhere.”

Then I ended up at CMU by chance for a high school internship. The internship itself taught me so much and gave me the opportunity to work with a publishing company at 17 years old, but I was also enchanted by the architecture of the old castle building and the tiny classrooms compared to large lecture halls of other universities. This learning experience seemed to promise a more one-on-one approach.

I grew up in the North End of Winnipeg, which I found difficult for a plethora of reasons. When I moved to northern Manitoba, I made a promise to myself that when I moved again, I would never move back to Winnipeg. If you’ve ever seen the movie Lady Bird, I had sort of the same melodramatic line of thinking as the main character. As she says in the film, “I want to go to the east coast. I want to go where culture is.”

I took a gap year after high school and kept my options open. I remembered that internship at CMU I had when I was 17, where I got the chance to edit the works of published authors. I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, but I knew I wanted to do that. I wanted to write, I wanted to read, and I wanted to have the space to talk about it with my professors and students alike.

Suddenly my promise to never move back to Winnipeg disappeared. How could I dislike a city I had hardly experienced? How could I ignore the experiences I’d had outside of my little bubble and disregard the new opportunities this city had to offer?

I moved back to Winnipeg to live with my dad (who, ironically, lives very close to a different university), ready to try going to CMU as an English student. I can very clearly accredit that moment in my life to when I started developing a love for Winnipeg and stopped longing to leave.

I believe that university is a time for learning how to be an independent adult and for gaining new experiences. That will likely remain true no matter which university you attend, but CMU specifically is the place that gave me a wholly positive experience of entering adulthood in Winnipeg.

From the people I’ve attended class with, to the people I’ve learned from, to the work I’ve done, CMU has fulfilled every romanticized ideal I thought university learning would be like—and I didn’t even have to leave Winnipeg for it.

Emma Williamson is a second-year Bachelor of Arts student, majoring in English.