Stephanie Marie H.

Tonight I was excited; truly, ridiculously, unreasonably excited. Why? Because as my roommates and I were doing our terribly overdue math homework, the 2012 NBA Draft was on television. For two hours, I sat at my coffee table multitasking math problems and listening to names I’ve never heard before go to teams I’ve never cared much about. And then it happened. Right there on my own television screen, my roommates and I watched a dream come true, proof that big dreams can really be achieved by real people. 

I’m a student at the University of Missouri in Columbia. A Mizzou Tiger for life. When two players from MY school were drafted to teams in the NBA, everything they worked for and dreamed about came true. They made it. Watching them finally catch the dreams they’d been chasing for so long was both eye opening and inspirational for me. It can really happen; people really can achieve their goals and reach their dreams, no matter how big they are. How many people probably told them they wouldn’t make it? Too many to count I’m sure. But they never gave up, they kept working. 

This was monumental for me. I think within the past few months I got caught up in everything going on around me; the stress, the good times, the people. I realized tonight that I should consider shifting my focus from all that and a little more in the direction of what I’m doing here at Mizzou. I want to be a journalist. I want to write for, design, and edit a magazine. I want to be successful. I want to be happy. I’ve always believe that good things come to those who wait. But for the first time, I’ve decided that maybe whoever first said that phrase is wrong. “Good things come to those who work their asses off and never give up.” For those two basketball players from Mizzou, they didn’t just sit around and wait for the basketball gods to call them to the NBA. No. Instead, they worked hard everyday until they made it. And that is what I intend to do from now on. Dreams are nothing without persistence and hard work. Like my fellow tigers did tonight, I plan on making MY dreams into reality one day too.