I applied to places in Texas, Maryland, Michigan and more. Whether the college was in or near a city didn’t matter to me, I just wanted a place that felt like home.

From the age of 6, when I moved from Michigan to Maryland just outside of Washington D.C., I always thought about coming back to the mitten for college. When I started the process of applying for colleges, it just seemed wrong not to apply somewhere in Michigan.

MSU wasn’t my top choice, but despite my doubts, I visited. If it’s possible to fall in love with a school, that’s exactly what I did. MSU felt like home.

When I got to MSU, I instantly knew I had made the right choice. The people and atmosphere fit me in almost every way, but for some reason, I found myself incredibly homesick.

I was not homesick for my family or my dog or my cozy bed in my own room, but conversation.

Being from just outside of D.C., conversations on recent politics and world issues often characterized my daily interactions. At MSU, we tend to gossip about the happenings on campus; in D.C., we gossip about the problems riddling Capitol Hill, our foreign policy and more.

When I arrived on campus, I found most students here not only don’t want to discuss these issues, they are completely uniformed. Unless teachers are using recent events for examples in class, many students don’t know or care about current issues.

I love being a Spartan, and part of the reason I came to MSU was the people and the atmosphere. However, it’s definitely easier to keep up with issues when you live just outside of D.C. My high school teachers brought up recent happenings on a daily basis, and everyone’s parents worked in D.C. Capitol Hill is your backyard, and national decisions become the neighborhood gossip.

I grew frustrated. The college atmosphere — what’s supposed to be a learning atmosphere — was not conducive to staying informed.

The issues of today will affect my generation tomorrow. So why does no one care?

Keeping up on our national agenda and happenings can be as easy as leaving Twitter open on your smartphone. There are national and local newspapers available throughout campus, and social networks such as Facebook have news pages students can follow. And yet, I’ll mention recent tragedies or Obama’s plan on contraception and few people actually know what I’m talking about.

To an extent, being uninformed is not entirely a student’s fault. College includes learning to balance a hectic schedule, and it takes some students, like myself, longer than others to learn.

I somehow forgot about the outside world when I first came to MSU. Although I wanted to know what was happening in the nation and world, I found myself overwhelmed by the adjustments to college. Between a new place, new classes and trying to make new friends, my personal news drowned out that of a national publication’s.

When I realized how uniformed I’d become, I quickly restarted my old habits of reading a few newspapers in the morning and watching the news at night. It took exactly one day for me to fall back in love with being informed.

This is one of many experiences that convinced me I wanted to be a journalist. Since I made that choice, I’ve found there are Spartans from all walks of life who do care about what’s going on in the world. Of course journalism students care about the latest news, but after taking a greater variety of classes, I have found there are far more informed students on campus than I originally thought.

These informed students are classmates, friends, random acquaintances and, of course, State News readers. Those lunchtime political conversations I’ve missed have returned with classmates in large lecture courses. I’ve found good friends, through various clubs and mutual acquaintances, who love to talk about current issues, maybe a little too much. But having friends who can’t stop talking about critical world issues is not a problem I’m too concerned with. MSU has once again proved me wrong, and I’m so grateful to be here.

Yes, I wish other students kept up with current issues, but it’s nice to know the cure for homesickness is closer than I thought.

Darcie Moran is a State News staff writer. Reach her at morandar@msu.edu.