Blog #36: Personal Anecdote

My topic deals with peer pressure and how it affects college students. For my personal anecdote, I think I am going to discuss how peer pressure has affected me in college and how I chose to deal with it. Peer pressure in college affects everyone and has affected me in many ways.  Personally, I felt the effects of peer pressure when I first started college. I felt the pressure to party and drink with all my peers in order to celebrate out new found freedom. I went out to parties and drank because I felt that was the way I could feel included and a way to make new friends. I did not want to be left out or looked down upon because I was not drinking on the weekends. But, once I started to find my niche and my core group of friends I realized that I did not have to drink in order to be accepted. I figured out that I could be myself and if that meant not drinking every weekend, then so be it. I realized that my friends would love me regardless if I drank every weekend with them. I even found out that they sometimes did not want to drink as well. I realized that I should do what makes me happy and not what others want me to do, because in the end it is my life. I have been brought up to be my own leader and to not follow the crowd. My parents have always taught me that being different and having a stable set of morals and values are a good thing. They taught me to be strong and to stand up for what I think is right and that it is okay to not follow the crowd. At the start of the year, it was difficult for me to resist the peer pressure because I did not have my family by my side to tell me what is right versus wrong. It was basically me. My parents said that this is my life and I have to make the decisions for myself because they cannot always be there to decide for me. So hopefully, my personal anecdote will make my article a little bit easier to read and pull the readers in as well.