As I sat in the bus rumbling toward downtown San Diego, a distant memory of a similar experience rippled through the surface of my apprehension. I recalled a moment eleven years ago when I first arrived in Iowa and learned that I would be whisked off to my new school in a colossal yellow bus, a drastic change from riding to preschool on my mom’s bicycle back in China. However fearful I was initially that my limited vocabulary would become a hindrance, my tongue gradually became familiar enough with the English language for me to join in the daily conversations on the bus. While I had managed to conquer school buses early on, my encounter with city buses didn’t arrive until the summer after third grade. Every day after camp, I would board the city bus, carrying myself as maturely and unassumingly as possible, exhausted from an intense game of Capture the Flag and my hair still dripping wet from the pool. As the only kid on the bus, even in my fatigued state, I felt as independent as the adults around me.

Now I found myself once again reunited with public transportation, facing a different kind of challenge in a whole new city. The summer after my junior year, I reached out to companies in San Diego in search of work experience within the field of technology. My application caught the eye of a web development agency, who invited me to an interview at their office downtown for the position of publishing intern. Without a driver’s license but determined nonetheless, I turned to my only viable choice of transportation — the city bus. Despite my initial hesitations, the prospect of achieving a long-sought-after goal trounced any qualms I had about the three-hour roundtrip.

Earlier that morning, I had boarded the bus with my handbag of paperwork and a bundle of nerves. It seemed almost surreal that an email I sent a month ago had brought me to this point. A hint of the fear I had experienced more than ten years ago settled in the pit of my stomach, but as the neighborhoods steadily faded from sight through the streaked windows, so did my anxiety. Somewhere in between the span of one-and-a-half hours, I realized that my destination was not the final stop downtown — it was the next milestone in a long journey. I was headed toward an interview as a fledgling to the field of web design, wedged between strangers in an uncomfortably sticky seat in the middle of summer, yet I was completely and utterly happy about it. By boarding this bus, I had already convinced myself that I could take on whatever challenges were set before me. The nerves and doubts were merely speed bumps, and the road I had paved for myself was well worth the rough ride.

When I glance in the rearview mirror, I’m reminded of how public transportation has played a role in many defining moments of my life, providing me with the compass to map out my own future. As a child, I conquered my fear of riding the bus alone because I had no other choice, but at seventeen years old, my decision to take on the roadblocks ahead marked my transition into adulthood. Looking forward, I glimpse a winding road littered with obstacles, but I no longer feel afraid of the unknown — for I am riding on a bus whose only direction is forward, and I am the driver.