Throughout my years at Binghamton University, I can only think of a few things that have actually challenged me. They include my semester abroad, a smattering of family conflicts and an even smaller number of academic classes.

But within the last semester, one class has made me confront the thing I now realize I knew the least about: myself. The gist of the course can be summed up with one question, which my teacher asked us in the very beginning: What does it mean to be you? I found that I barely had an answer, especially when our teacher told us to discount physical attributes. Instead, she wanted to know what mattered to us and what our purpose was in life.

Before this, I thought I had my life planned out to a T, from the moment I graduated to where I’d be in 10 years. But none of that seemed to answer my teacher’s question.

How, I thought, can I be nearly finished with college, on the cusp of entering the ‘real world,’ and have no idea of what is really important to me at the end of the day? In other classes, we’re taught to memorize information, regurgitate it and use it to help us find a career path. This, my last semester at BU, was the first time I’d thought about what I want from my life, not my future job or anything else that seemed so necessary on the surface.

The fact that I also took a painting class, where our professor encouraged us to really see the world for what it was, and not what we’d thought it was for the last 20 years, had a real impact on me. In a huge change from my goals and objectives of other semesters, I thought about something so much more significant than schoolwork, grades or my ‘life ambitions’ ‘ I thought about my actual life.

I can’t say that after three months of thinking about what my life really means to me I have it figured out, but I am walking away knowing something so much more essential: the importance of asking myself who I am and who I want to be every single day. That’s the only way I’ll ever truly know where I’m headed.

As of right now, I know that I value kindness, passion and compassion. I know that I want to learn something truly new everyday, and I know that as clich√É© as it sounds, I don’t want my life to be measured solely in academic or career achievements.

My answer each day is something I know will vary from time to time, but I really believe that I need to know what I valued then and what I value now to be able to value anything 10 years down the road. To think otherwise just doesn’t make sense, and I can’t thank my teacher enough for being the one person in four years to actually ask me the toughest question of all.