My First Love

I stumbled upon The Daily Collegian when I was a junior at Penn State.  I first wrote opinion columns during a summer semester, and then I wrote in the fall of my senior year.  I'll never forget the Valentine's Day when a group of students on the paper debuted a new section on dating and romance.  The new section had one consequence: the op-ed writer on Valentine's Day was forbidden from writing about romantic love. That writer happened to be me.

After thinking about it long and hard, I wrote about my very first love in this column.   I still have the e-mails from students and faculty members who wrote to say that they called their mothers after reading it.  Looking back, two things: please excuse the photo. More importantly, I'd have written it differently - I'm older now, and a more seasoned writer - but the message is still precisely the same.