Vivi Abrams is a Medill senior. She can be reached at [email protected].

There’s nothing more annoying for a journalist than to be in the wrong place when something big happens. Make that your hometown, and a worldwide top story, and the frustration reaches ultimate levels. Here I am in Evanston while history is happening by the second in Tallahassee, Fla. I feel like I did when I was 10 and it snowed for the first time in Tallahassee in 15 years.

My family and I were visiting relatives in Miami. My dad took my little sisters to the Florida Supreme Court building last week to see the goings-on. Debbie, 8, was less than impressed.

“It was SOOOO boring,” she told me. “I wish all of this was just over. It’s all anyone ever talks about anymore. Bush, Gore, Bush, Gore, blah, blah, blah.”

Debbie shares the sentiments of many Americans. But unlike many Americans, she gets to be bored firsthand. Maybe I’m a geek, but I think that’s cool.

Now, the whole world is focused on Tallahassee, the place formerly known as “Home of Doak Campbell Stadium” (No, I don’t know Bobby Bowden). I turn on the television each night and see home. I see home in the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times. And for the first time in four years, I wish I was there instead of here.

So many seniors share my place-confusions now, as we hop from job interview to job interview. Where to go? If we leave, what will we miss out on? Take a job in June, or travel for a few months, or a year? Do I move close to my parents or other loved ones, or branch out on my own? Go back “home?” What if I choose the wrong place?

Well if this presidential election and subsequent fracas in Tallahassee, home of the Southern Shakespeare festival (“We braketh for roadkill”), is teaching me anything, it’s that there is no such thing as the wrong place.

Everything always changes, and the smallest town, or back-up job, or the place you really don’t want to go could end up being your big break or the place where you meet the love of your life. Who would have ever thought that if I’d just gone to write for the Tallahassee Democrat that I’d get to cover a story of such magnitude?

It’s weird because for 21 years all that we were ever asked was to live up to others’ expectations — make our parents proud, our teachers proud, our hometown proud. Northwestern students are good at that. And now, we have to find out what makes us happy and which direction to go to find that. It’s scary, and we don’t want to make the wrong decision.

A friend of mine who just accepted a job in her second-place town told me Monday, “I can’t discern between ‘want’ and ‘supposed.'”

I just feel like my destiny is following a path.”

When will we learn that “paths” just don’t exist? That there are many “right” decisions and that we can learn from all of them?

I thought I was missing out on something great when I missed a chance at snowfall in Tallahassee, but I was actually doing something greater: Visiting my grandparents. How was I to know they’d be gone less than ten years later? My first memory of snow is NU, freshman year, building a one-foot-tall snowman with Mike from San Diego and Jeffrey from Hawaii.

I wouldn’t trade it for the world — or a trip home to see the Supreme Court in action.