On Thanksgiving, I took some serious time to think about what I’m truly thankful for this year. The first things to come to mind were the clichés: my family, friends and health. After those general joys in my life, my thanks got more specific. One person that immediately came to mind was my friend Adam.

Adam and I have been good friends since high school, so it was not surprising when he graduated a semester early to join the few brave men and women willing to put their country first in the U.S. Army. When we spent time together before his deployment to Afghanistan, I started to notice how different our lives have become.

Hearing about Adam’s daily life as a part of the greatest military in the world made me proud of him for following his own dreams. So often, many of us think that success is only found if we take the straight and narrow track of graduating high school to continuing our education at a four-year college, then getting a job and starting our own lives. At MU, it is easy to get caught up in this all-too-familiar path to success, but there are other forms of success we don’t always pay respect to.

Many of us have been drilled to believe we need to receive a formal education at some institution in order to land a great job, be successful and pay the bills. We fail to recognize that college is not for everyone — there are other ways to chase dreams and be successful.

While 70 percent of high school graduates enroll at a two- or four-year college right after receiving their high school degree, there is still that 30 percent. Those others who chose not to attend college for whatever reason likely end up joining the military, attending a trade school, or maybe even taking a year or two off to explore different options. While we may not see it, those people will find their success just as anyone graduating with honors would.

A prime example of this is the man who has changed the way we communicate for better and sometimes worse. For those of you who missed the movie “The Social Network,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg attended Harvard up until he created Facebook and then chose not to return to school so he could work on his increasingly popular website. Zuckerberg was No. 1 on Vanity Fair’s list of the “most influential people of the Information Age” in 2010.

As faithful Facebook users, I think we really owe it to Zuckerberg. How would we make it through our long lecture classes or mass communicate with groups of people without his social networking revolution? Zuckerberg, and the others like him who took the path less traveled, shows that a degree does not equal automatic success or respect — hard work does.

While there have been statistics drawn up that say a college degree raises your chances of getting a job, not getting a degree does not mean unemployment for life. Today’s society has bombarded us with the idea that we must go to a four-year college after graduating high school and get our degree. However, I don’t think that is necessarily true.

Vocational schools such as cosmetology school provide an education that leads to many successful careers. For Adam, joining the U.S. Army was his way to personal success.

This Thanksgiving, I thought about Adam and everyone else who serves our country to ensure our freedom. Sometimes we are shielded from the rest of the world and the other opportunities out there for us.

I know I made the right decisions for myself deciding to attend MU for my journalism degree, just as Adam made the right decision for himself in joining the army. And let’s be honest, Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to quit Harvard and perfect Facebook is something to be thankful for as well.