by Megan Cline

 When I first started at Mount Liberty College, I was a very different person from who I am today. As many of my professors will attest, I was fairly quiet and didn’t participate a ton in class. I was in class, but at the time didn’t understand how to contribute to the conversation around ideas I had rarely interacted with previously. With so many intelligent minds in the room, it was difficult for me not to feel impostor syndrome in many classes. However, I then went on an 18-month mission for the LDS church, and that helped me realize a few things. One, how blessed I was in my education before going on my mission, and two, how education and life is supposed to be full of mistakes and failure, and that if I don’t try despite having imposter syndrome or wondering if I am going to say something completely idiotic, then my time is going to be wasted, and I am not going to be changed by the education or my life in the way I want. I realized I had a choice, and I was the only one responsible for how I allowed both my faith and my education to affect me.

It is fairly easy in most classrooms, and sometimes even at Mount Liberty, to get away with listening to a lecture or discussion or doing a few reading assignments, without really allowing yourself to be changed by the content or discussion or feeling a need to be invested in it. I fully admit i have gone through classes while being like that. However, over time, after multiple experiences with a book, a classmate’s or professor’s comment, or ideas that really resonate, it is difficult to want to go back to being a passive learner.

I want to read this quote from Ezra Taft Benson that has greatly impacted my philosophy on life, and I have come to understand and value deeply through my experience at Mount Liberty College. “The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.”

I just love how clearly this college is a place of opportunity for these internal changes to happen. The change that comes from going to this college is not from forced behavior, and it’s certainly not because it has had glamorous classrooms, but instead Mount Liberty and the people within it provide a genuine choice to become something different as we seek individually for Truth. This school teaches us how to live better, how to think more clearly, live more intentionally, and become more Godly in the process.

MLC has given me direction and a framework from which a good life can continue to build on. MLC taught me how to be a lifelong learner, a better human, someone who strives to understand the world, other people, and myself—and most importantly, someone who understands the importance of becoming more Godly.

MLC created space where we could talk about difficult, controversial topics, with open minds and intellectual honesty. It’s taught me how to discern which principles I believe are worth living by, and how to hold those beliefs while exploring the many ideas that are out there.

To my professors—I want thank you for pushing me, for believing in me, and for being examples of what it means to live a life of both intellect and integrity. They are good people as well as being good mentors.

I am also so grateful to my family for the support they have shown and through them even having the opportunity to choose to go to Mount Liberty College.

In life, we aren’t just given information. We’re being constantly invited into transformation, and as students or family members, community members, patriots, or wherever and whatever we may be doing in life, we each get to choose whether we accept that invitation to transformation.