Over spring break, I had the opportunity to visit with old high school friends who, unlike myself, went away to college. While it was nice to reunite with people I hadn’t seen in several months, I realized that few of them, if any, could understand my decision to stay in town for school.

“Why did you stay?” they asked. “(Insert big city here) is much more exciting than Fresno.”

When it comes to the things that make a city exciting, I tend to agree. Considering museums, movie theaters, shopping centers and clubs, big cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles have more, plain and simple. But we Fresno kids have a few things bigger cities don’t.

For one, we have the mountains. We have a great view of the Sierra Nevadas (not every day, I’ll admit), but we have a two-hour drive to the slopes, as opposed to those in larger cities, who have to drive much longer to go snowboarding or hiking.

We have Clovis Unified School District (CUSD). Yes, for those of us who grew up in Clovis Unified, it was more than a little frustrating to put up with the dress code and the seemingly endless amount of rules. But despite these frustrations, CUSD turns out the most well-prepared students of any public school district in the state.

According to a recent article in Fresno Magazine, 60 percent of Clovis Unified students go on to college, a considerably higher statistic than many other school districts in the state.

We also have Fresno State, a university that brings the entire city together over football games, Vintage Days and concerts at the Save Mart Center (Taylor Swift, anyone?).

The fact that we, as a school, are almost 100 years old speaks to our ability to stick out the tough times, times that were even harder than what we’re going through now: The Great Depression, two World Wars and the political and social turmoil of the ‘60s and ‘70s all threw curveballs at every American, including those who lived in Fresno. Fresno State stuck around through it all, and has continued to be an entity that the rest of the city rallies around.

We have the Fresno Grizzlies, another rallying point for the city. I grew up going to Grizzlies games every spring, and now that I’m in college, it’s fun to go to a game with friends who didn’t have baseball teams in their hometowns.

Like every city, Fresno has its faults. A lot of my friends left town to go to college to escape the bad air, the crime and the feeling that there wasn’t enough to do here. I grew up here, I know the problems Fresno has.

But what city doesn’t have problems? A city is only as good as the people in it. And, despite all the city’s problems, I’ve found that the people here are good people, from the wealthiest residents in town to the homeless, and everyone in between.

Fresno isn’t the most glamorous or exciting city, but it is a city built on the backs of hard-working people who do the best they can for themselves and their families. And that’s enough for me.