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After I helped you move a few clothes, a coffee pot and some cherished books into your Marycrest Hall room at the University of Dayton, I unfolded a letter you wrote to us last spring.

"Now is a crucial time to voyage off to a new world full of wonder and spirituality," you wrote in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade us to allow you to travel to Tibet to study with the monks for a few months before college. You were just 17, and already expressing a curiosity about the world and your place in it.

I then pulled out a letter I wrote to you for your high school senior year time capsule and laughed at the childhood memory that popped off the page. "Do you remember this crazy and imaginative exchange we once had? Everyone knows you shouldn't accept a ride from a stranger, but you thought there must be at least one exception to this rule. 'If I were lost in the woods with no one around and a limousine pulled up, would it be acceptable to have a limousine ride?'" you asked as I drove you to school.

You have shown an inquisitiveness about the world and a spontaneity for life that books alone cannot teach. Some would say you're overly confident and too impulsive. You've always believed you've had all the answers and certainly know the exceptions to the rules. You skirted that line with your teachers throughout school.

Yet as you start your first year at the University of Dayton, you find yourself full of questions. And you're worried.

"You're 18 and you don't know what you want to do? That's the best thing I've heard you say," said political science professor Mark Ensalaco over lunch. "Ask tough questions," he advised. "We need more people asking excellent questions instead of giving meaningless answers."

In your first few weeks as a college student, you read "the most profound thing" you've ever read in Margaret Strain's Writing Seminar 1. Mike Rose's essay, "I Just Want to be Average," opened your eyes to how one person who believes in you can change your life.

You helped your Saudi Arabian roommate write a paper. As part of the social justice learning-living community in your dorm, you traveled to Edison School to tutor a fourth grader in basic arithmetic.

You're already exploring study-abroad options in Africa and are quick to grab a Nerf gun for stress-relieving, heated battles that break out randomly on the dorm's second floor.

And while you're not Catholic, you were visibly moved by Father Jim Schimelpfening, S.M.'s words at first-year orientation Mass at the University of Dayton Arena. "I hope you learn how to ask questions, the questions that really make a difference, the questions that change lives," he said.

"We're not a world at peace. Are you willing to be a peacemaker? We're not a world with universal health care. Are you willing to hear the cry of the poor and be the voice for the voiceless? Who do you say you are? How you answer that question sets the stage for everything."

Who do you say you are?

The answer isn't part of a pop quiz in physics, won't jump off the page of a reading assignment.

It's a question that will weave through every class, every friendship, every experience during your college days - and beyond.

It's time for you to voyage to a world you will create, a new world full of wonder.

- Teri Rizvi

Teri Rizvi is the founder of the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop and executive director of strategic communications at the University of Dayton. This essay will appear in the winter issue of the University of Dayton Magazine.