[ClassyLady]

I attend an HBCU and I absolutely love it. I am having the time of my life and receiving a great education. I could not see myself in school anywhere else.

I went to an all-white elementary school. My middle school and high school were about 50% white and 50% everything else. I liked that experience. But, when it came time to pick a college, I knew I wanted to attend an HBCU.

The environment that I grew up in was not full of positive and upwardly mobile young black people. Sure, I knew professional blacks, but they were all my mother's age. Everyone that I knew and went to school with was doing absolutely nothing with themselves and had even less planned for their futures. The few black students like myself were so stuck-up and "corny" that I couldn't stand to be arond them. There was nobody like me, smart and ambitious, but still cool. I wanted to surround myself with positive black people and I knew that attending a black college would be my last opportunity to do so.

I wasn't sold on my school until I had actually visited the campus. I had narrowed my choices down to UNC, Spelman, and FAMU. Compared to the other two, FAM had the friendliest campus. It was just a family atmosphere. When my mother and I got lost looking for a building, someone walked us to exactly where we need to be. At UNC and Spelman, people barely wanted to point us in the right direction. I still feel the family atmosphere here after some years. I am still friends with everyone who lived on my hallway my freshman year. My friends will tell me that I know I need to go to class. It's like everyone here wants you to succeed.

The most successful people in my family attended HBCUs. My grandparents went to Tuskegee, my parents went to Lincoln (PA), and my sister went to Hampton. These are not the only college educated people in my family, but the ones who attended majority institutions have yet to reach a moderate level of success. I have a cousin who went to Princeton who can barely hold a job, and she has an MBA. It's my mother's opinion that she should have attended and HBCU because she needs that nurturing that a black college can provide.

The one thing that I don't like is the negative connotation that goes along with attending a black college. People think that I go to FAM because it's the only school I could get into. I got accepted to every school that I applied to and those are some of the best colleges in this country. I could have gone to NYU or Georgetown, but I wanted to go to FAMU!!!!