BYU - J

It's great for many reasons. One of them being its respect for all things Harry Potter. It holds Triwizard tournaments, the bells play the theme song, and many of my fellow students compliment my Gryffindor scarf as i make my way across campus. It also doesn't have a curfew and overly restrictive dress code like our sister school BYU Idaho. (Sorry, Karly)

I also like that people, for the most part, are extremely intelligent. It's refreshing to go to a place with so many smart people. On the flip side, I also get intimidated by this more than quite often.

Here come the complaints.

I HATE how much kids compete here. It gets ridiculous sometimes. The way people talk about grades, ACT scores, AP test scores, random factoids that nobody cares about but they like to rant about them anyways to try to sound smart... I can never get a break. I honestly don't know many random factoids, so they of course succeed in their attempts because I feel like quite the idiot.

"You don't know the seventeenth president of the United States?" **look of pity**

Why did we ever try to score and measure intelligence?

The majority of these kids have wasted their lives away trying and succeeding their butts off in school, never having a good rebellious night of TPing or barely missing the cops. I think intelligence doesn't have a thing to do with facts, figures, or trying too hard. Can you learn from your mistakes? Can you see things from somebody else's point of view? Can you connect with and find the good in other people? These things can't be measured, they can only be experienced. When I'm in heaven and I get to watch my life movie on a big screen, (doctrine of Jaclyn) it would be crushingly boring to watch myself studying and working all the time. I hope to watch myself helping others, whether it be spiritually or physically. I hope to see that I did some good in the world, whatever it may be. I'm not saying we should ditch the books, learning is a wonderful thing and we are commanded to gain knowledge on this earth, but there are more important things that we were sent here to do as well.

As for me, I'm still figuring out what that is, but I will. In the meantime, I'm going to try to stop worrying about how little I know about the world map and instead travel the real and moving world. Instead of worrying about old dead guys that admittedly did extremely important things, I'm going to worry about living people that may need my help or anything else that I can give them. Let's learn from each other. Let's learn from our mistakes. Let's try to recognize our mission in this life and accomplish it to the best of our ability.

"You are good. But it is not enough just to be good. You must be good for something. You must contribute good to the world. The world must be a better place for your presence. And the good that is in you must be spread to others." - Gordon B. Hinckley

And in case you were wondering, it's Andrew Johnson