"I got accepted?" "Are you serious or is this a cruel joke?" When the day came that I got my acceptance letter from Virginia Tech I could barely drive home to see the actual letter. My whole body was shaking and I could not dial the phone fast enough to inform every member of my family and all of my friends. I ran through the front door of my house and my mom met me with a big hug and handed me the letter. She had not opened it yet, but the label on the outer envelope read "official acceptance enclosed" and sort of gave away the big surprise. I pulled out the letter, which was on a nice crisp piece of paper with the official letterhead. I then proceeded to read the first sentence. "Congratulations" was all it read and that was enough for me to jump up and down for five minutes. I guess high school really had been good for something. I felt as though a big weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. I finally belonged somewhere and that somewhere was Virginia Tech. My family, society, school and even my own expectations of myself influenced my decision to attend college and also I have set goals to become independent, laid back, and have a self satisfying career. .
The single force that has had the biggest impact on my choice to attend college is my family; mainly my parents. Being raised in a household where education is taken very seriously, I was presented with only one option. This option was of course, "You will attend college after high school and pass all four years". My parents explained and taught me as I matured that it was necessary to have a college degree to obtain any decent job. I always new that I could fall back on a job at McDonalds, but my parents had much higher expectations than that. I knew I could not disappoint them. Also my father has only a high school education and got a job as a contractor as soon as he graduated high school. Granted he owns his own business; he has had to perform hard labor for many years to get to where he is now.