You Can't Stir Fry in the Blender: My Journey Away from College
I'm in a small white room, lying back on a long, adjustable, vinyl covered chair. There's blinding white light fixed above the chair shining right into my eyes. The room is silent except for the occasional clink of steel on steel as someone out of my line of vision readies the (gulp) instruments. I know all too well what will follow, but I still give an involuntary jump when it happens. Without warning, a figure in a white lab coat stands over me firing question after question. "How old are you?"

 "Sixteen."

 "What grade are you in?"

"Um, tenth, I mean eleventh, well, sorta both. You see, I skipped a grade and--"

"You're homeschooled, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Thought so. Do you floss every day?"

"Can we try another question?"

"What are you going to do in college?"

I fight back panic as I try to think of something clever to say. It escapes me and I find myself saying in a very small voice, "I'm not going to college." Dead silence fills the room. The dental hygienist holds up two small, plastic x-rays and pronounces my sentence. "Two cavities."

I am part of a small, but significant, minority of homeschoolers (mostly homeschooled girls) who have decided not to go to college. However, even though I'm odd, I still don't get the satisfaction of feeling a "part" of this community of odd people. I don't live on a remote farm, shunning the world with my twenty siblings. I'm not a disciple of the "back to the Victorian era" movement. I don't believe that all college girls are feminists, and I don't even think that all colleges are part of a vast communist conspiracy.

In the beginning, at least, my parents and I decided that I would not go to college, for lack of a nobler sounding way of putting it, because I just wasn't interested. I had other things to do with my life. I love to write, hate math, love working with my hands, hate bookwork, love small children and old people, and have never hit it off particularly well with the "hip" young collegiate crowd. There was so much I wanted to learn about real life skills after I was done with school and I wasn't too thrilled with the idea of sitting in a classroom studying biology and calculus instead. Until the spring before my senior year, I was perfectly content with this choice.

Then panic hit. It all started innocently enough. I announced one day that I would like to take the SAT. I'd never taken that sort of test before, and I thought it might be fun. It was fun, challenging and interesting. My math scores certainly ruled out the possibility of my ever becoming an Einstein, but my verbal score was good enough to almost make up for that.

The wheels began turning . . . I had never taken much algebra. I wonder how my scores would be if I studied algebra 2 this year . . . You know, I probably could hold my own in college after all . . . I always thought that I would be a wife and mother when I grew up, but, what if I don't marry for a long time, or never marry? It would be kind of fun to be a teacher, or what about a political journalist? That sounds intriguing. The next few months were a whirlwind of scholarship and college application forms, morning to evening bookwork to fill in my "gaps" and endless conversations at the dinner table about whether every daily activity in my schedule would fit in with the "Possibility of College Plan."