I’ve Become A Tourist: One Week At Syracuse, NY
Tourists taking a closer look at Horseshoe Falls in Niagara Falls, ON.
I've been in Syracuse for a week now, and I'd be lying if I said it felt easy.
There are a thousand miles between me and everything familiar. My hometown, my family, the friends who watched me grow at Dillard, the campus where I first picked up a camera and figured out who I wanted to be. All of that is far away now, and this new city, this new program, this new version of my life is still just an outline waiting to be filled in.
So yes, I've been nervous. Some nights that nervousness turns into a quieter question I haven't said out loud until now: did I make the right choice?
Somewhere in the middle of that uncertainty, a professor gave me a piece of advice that I haven't stopped thinking about since. They told me that if you feel even a slight pull toward something, a hint of curiosity or passion, you owe it to yourself to explore it. Be a tourist of the field. Walk around in it. Look at it the way you'd look at a new city, with your eyes open and no rush to have it all figured out.
So that's what I did, literally and figuratively. I walked through Syracuse. I found new coffee shops and quiet streets and corners of campus I hadn't seen yet. I let myself be a visitor in this place instead of demanding that it feel like home right away. And somewhere in that walking, in that noticing, something settled in me. This is for me. This program, this city, this next chapter, all of it.
I'm at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications now, working toward my M.S. in Multimedia Photography and Design, and I can already feel the size of what's ahead. New mentors, new collaborators, new work that will push me past what I made at Dillard and through Suave Snaps. I don't know exactly what this year holds yet, and for the first time in a while, I'm okay with that not knowing.
If you're standing at the edge of something new, whether it's a new city, a new job, a new field you're only slightly curious about, here's what I'd tell you. Go be a tourist. Walk around in it before you decide it's not for you. Give yourself permission to explore before you have proof.
Keep striving. Keep being a tourist, no matter where you go.
