A few weeks ago, former CA student Elizabeth Dodd sat in her speech class faced with a challenge: get out of your comfort zone and write a speech about your experience.

“I was kind of excited about the assignment,” Dodd recalled, “because it was so different. I knew I had to do something worthwhile.”

While deciding how she would move beyond the reaches of her comfort zone, Dodd was looking in the mirror when “this crazy idea hit me.” Shaving her head.

Once the idea was in her mind, she couldn’t shake it.

“It was kind of a dare to myself,” Dodd said, “to prove to myself that I could do it and would do it.”

So, she did it. She shaved her head and has learned a lot about herself from the experience.

Dodd said that the hardest parts of her self-experiment were all the firsts: telling her parents, going to class for the first time, and going to work for the first time. “After they were over, it was easy. I actually felt a little more invincible,” Dodd said.

What surprised Dodd the most was how nobody made a huge fuss over her lack of hair. Her classmates didn’t attack her with questions, and several coworkers complimented her on her new look.

Though this all started as a simple speech assignment, it has positively impacted other aspects of Dodd’s life.

“It’s been confidence boosting,” Dodd said, “I think that it has made me kind of refocus and get some perspective.”

The big takeaway Dodd has from this chapter of her life is this message for both men and women: “What you look like is surely a part of you, but it’s not totally who you are. What makes you beautiful or smart or cool is obviously what’s inside. That sounds so cliché, but it’s true…When you experience that and when you are able to accept yourself the way you are, it’s a really enriching experience.”