Going back to college

After becoming frum, I went into the standard college is shtus mode. I tried to maintain this for many years, but it never really took hold. And I don't think that the difficulty of change is the primary reason for that. The reason is that college is not schtus. Certainly much of it is. I knew that even then. But much is quite positive. It's madah, it's chochmah, it's even Torah in a way. Overall, college lead me to yiddishkite as I learned about religious devotion via the poets, learned to think in new perspectives, learned about moral conservatism, learned about Bible from Christians on campus. I never hooked up with the religious Jews because I found them too odd.  The Christians knew how to be pleasant. But I didn't become Christian. Rather, they introduced me to my tradition. College has its problems - the promiscuity is terrible. The snobbery is terrible. But parts are quite positive. Moreover, I worked my whole life to get there, so to try to extirpate it from the mind is unhealthy - you wind up cutting off much of your brain along with that kind of gesture. So now I embrace my college and I don't hide it even from the Lakewood crowd.