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Growing up in a rural town, I always assumed certain colleges belonged to someone else.

Schools like those felt distant. Like places you saw in rankings or movies, not somewhere a student from a town of fewer than 5,000 people and a class of 18 realistically ends up. I had the ambition, but I also carried a quiet assumption that students like me didn’t really belong in those spaces.

It took traveling hundreds of miles away from home to realize how much that belief was shaped by something simple, something I hadn’t been exposed to yet.

One moment sticks with me. I was 578 miles from home, sitting in my local congressman’s office in Washington DC. During the meeting, I shared a statistic that caught the whole room’s attention: 95% of Michigan’s population lives on just 16% of the state’s landmass.

Curious, I asked how he compared with colleagues from large urban districts who don’t understand rural life.

His answer was simple: You don’t do it alone.

At the time, the comment didn’t fully resonate. In my school, fewer than a third of graduates attend four-year colleges. Selective universities felt almost mythical—places that you read about in the New York Times but had never actually met any alumni.

Like many rural students, I became a jack-of-all-trades out of necessity. I spent bus rides to football games memorizing lines for our school musical, and downtime during rehearsals reviewing game film. But even while juggling these roles, I quietly carried a goal that felt unrealistic to say out loud: attending one of the country’s most selective universities.

The more I shared those aspirations, the more they were met with skepticism. Sometimes this doubt came from others, but often, it was internal.

That mindset began to change when I traveled another 925 miles to Atlanta to join the 2025 cohort of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association’s Youth Leadership Council. There I met fellow rural peers from across the nation who had grown up in communities very similar to mine.

For the first time, I realized something important: I wasn’t the only rural student thinking big.

Through those peers, I learned about opportunities I had never encountered before: college fly-in programs, leadership conferences, and scholarships designed to help students visit campuses and expand their networks. Many of these programs were fully funded, meaning students could explore universities they might otherwise never interact with in person.

Each trip changed my perspective. Universities that once felt distant and intimidating became places I could walk through, ask questions in, and imagine myself attending.

When I looked deeper into the college process, I realized many of the doubts I had about belonging weren’t based on reality, they were based on what I hadn’t been exposed to yet.

Opportunity wasn’t scarce. Awareness of it was.

That realization pushed me to do something about it. Using the network I built through these programs, I began cataloging scholarships, fly-ins, and leadership opportunities that are free for rural students to attend. By increasing awareness of these resources across rural areas, my goal is that no student ever dismisses their ambitions simply because they didn’t know opportunities existed.

I’m still the same rural student from a town of five thousand.
The difference now is that I’ve seen what’s possible, and once you see it, it becomes much easier to ask a different question.

Why not me?

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David Wahl is a member of the 18 student Class of 2026 at St. Mary
Cathedral School in Gaylord, Michigan. He is a 5-time fly-in participant, the
2025 NRECA Youth Leadership Council Representative for Michigan, and
a Walter and Suzanne Scott Scholar at the University of Notre Dame where
he will be studying engineering and business.

Favorite resources: STARS fly-ins, UStrive’s college specific mentoring, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) Youth Programs

See David’s “A Beginner’s Guide to College Fly-Ins” here.