<p>Oh gosh, can I remember everywhere I applied anymore? Let’s see…
(bear with me, as this is, years later, still an intensely emotional story to me - in a good way, mind you, but long and descriptive)</p>
<p>Admitted:
- UChicago
- Harvard
- Carnegie Mellon</p>
<p>Waitlisted:
- Caltech
- Carleton (waitlist with a friendly handwritten note at the bottom basically letting me know that if I actually want to come, they’ll take me)
- Tufts</p>
<p>Rejected:
- Haverford
- Brown (stunning to me is, considering how heartbreaking this was at the time, I had to look it up on my old LiveJournal… couldn’t remember at the moment I’d applied there!)
- Amherst</p>
<p>While CMU is awesome, for whatever reason there was no way my parents would let me consider it over Harvard. But let’s back up: all I’d been hearing my entire life was Harvard Harvard Harvard… it’s not like I felt pressure about having to go there or something, I wasn’t rebelling against my parents’ wishes; I just was so inundated with the opinions of others about the school from such a young age that, even as replies started trickling in (a reject here, a waitlist there), I’d yet to form <em>any</em> sort of opinion about the place - I was completely and utterly neutral about it. Sweet little flower child that I was, Brown was my first choice because everyone was happy and I could take just math classes, but I almost applied EA to Haverford instead after a really awesome tour (parents put the full stop on that). And then there I was, rejected from 3 schools, waitlisted at 3 more, and yet to get in <em>anywhere</em>?!? Oh crap.</p>
<p>And then pulling into the driveway one day, I see my parents smiling the most ridiculously huge smiles on earth, hovering at the doorway like they’ve been waiting for me to come home since the mailman came howevermany hours ago. They said hi to me a half dozen times each before I’d even fully extricated myself from my seatbelt. I knew there was a letter, a big one, and from where, before I’d even gotten a “how are you?” out of them and my bag out of the trunk. And between their tip-off before seeing it myself, and everyone’s continued enthusiasm about the school, I sat there opening my admission letter from Harvard, my first college acceptance letter, sort of bored and disappointed. Was this it? Was I only going to get into one school? Good lord - was I only going to get into <em>Harvard</em>? My laughter at this thought was similar enough to excitement that The Parents, somehow worried the happy colourful envelope somehow may contain a rejection, found they could relax into celebration.</p>
<p>And then for 24 hours (or was it 48?), it was true - I was only in at Harvard. And acutely aware of how completely ridiculous this was. And bit by bit, that irony slowly started to chip away at my neutrality: I was <em>in</em> at <em>Harvard</em>! - isn’t this every student’s dream? Why on earth was I upset about this? And by the end of the day, I was pretty ecstatic about Harvard… and <em>then</em> Mum drove by to drop off a big letter from UChicago. Argh! This decision would have been <em>so much</em> easier 24, even 12 hours ago.</p>
<p>Passover came right about when various visiting weekends generally were this year, and Harvard pulled this totally BS move by pushing its weekend later, and their response deadline later, ‘out of respect for the holiday.’ I’m Jewish. Passover is not a big important holiday you need to drop your entire life for. Especially not from a school that, as far as I can tell, gives Columbus day off but holds classes on Yom Kippur. BS. What this allowed them to do though, was hold the weekend just around the same time that a lot of other decisions to other schools were due. C’mon, Harvard, it’s not like you need that extra edge over the competition - you’re freaking <em>Harvard</em>.</p>
<p>I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit, I did not know a whole lot about UChicago, even upon deciding to attend. The overachieving and well-lopsided mathematician, planning to take 100% math classes in the open curriculum of Brown, I knew neither of Chicago’s Core, nor of the incredible math department. I’d never heard of Scav, Kuvia, or even Chicago Economics. I was still thinking it might be interesting to check out some engineering classes. But I knew the school was good - good enough that my parents would let me consider it instead of Harvard, and I knew what I experienced on that overnight visit in April.</p>
<p>These students did not spend their time griping about workload (no seriously - we complain in good fun on occasion, but not nearly as much as they say) or gossiping about irrelevancies. They were happy, albeit perhaps a little stressed, and intensely passionate, and completely psyched about their school. Volunteers cheered for those of us staying the night in their dorms before leading us back - a great tradition, poignantly remembered in my O-Week as O-Aides cheered for us, their new dormmates, and again this past summer as, an O-Aide, over the music and chaos I screamed with joy to my new housemates, losing my voice for the next 4 days in the process. We played with the undergrads a silly game called “What’s in your milk?” that’s about trying to get others to laugh without laughing yourself, and were so ridiculously awkward, but non-apologetically so. Comfortably so. At dinner that night, I watched in awe as intense debate raged over the dinner table about whether psychiatrists should be required to attend medical school, well-thought-out and interestingly presented, completely spur-of-the-moment and interspersed with inside jokes and the occasional ironic ‘your mom,’ engaged in by many, although only one of the students had any desire to become a psychiatrist. It was ok to be <em>interested</em> in things - other people were interested in their things, too, and got drawn in to your excited descriptions of yours and really <em>interacted</em> and <em>thought</em> in these ways I’d never seen before. This community! These people! The school - it was perfect. The exact environment I was supposed to be in, filled with the sort of people I was supposed to interact with, student and professor alike (I’ll spare you the descriptions of the classes I attended for time’s sake - suffice to say, they were similarly intense and friendly, with extremely likable and accessible professors).</p>
<p>I tried really hard to like Harvard, even a fraction as much. I came in to their overnight program, keenly aware that it ended Sunday night and Chicago wanted my reply by Monday, very excited at the prospect of another visit as fun and interesting and expanding as UChicago’s, extremely hopeful that this would be the place, as, close with my family, I really wanted to exist closer to our home in the Boston suburbs. I tried so hard to find even a glimmer of the intensity and joy - yes, even the awkwardness, of UChicago’s students… this just was not my school. Nobody even seemed to be smiling, and I barely even talked to my own host - just no one was interested in whether we came there or not, even really, it appeared, whether they were there or not. Everyone at my school laughs when I tell them I chose UChicago over Harvard because students at Harvard didn’t seem happy at my overnight - “and they did <em>here</em>?” is the self-depreciating response I receive, the workload one of our school’s ever-funny punchlines. But the thing is, they were - we are. The work is hard, but the students take it on because they love it: that kid in your house who never leaves the library could easily not have taken three honors classes and an upperclassman seminar at once, but they were all so <em>interesting</em>… and so on. It’s only hard because we do not know how to say no to the hard courses, that extra one on Tolkien or that one fantastic professor. It’s hard because we exist as intensely outside the classroom as in, if not more so, doing what many would consider independent research but we just call browsing the internet, engaging in intensely meaningful debates just for the fun of it, even sharing course material we’ve found particularly inspiring. So yeah, it hard - but only because we want it to be, make it be so. It was those students - the ones who could not say no, to one more class, to this cool club, to that discussion even though they really should get back to that paper: they are why I came to this school. You might consider it incredibly lucky that I found such intensely perfect programs for my interests, given how little I knew about the school when I accepted their admission late that Sunday night, writing a passionate e-mail to the dean as well in case my letter did not make it in time. I think, rather, that given a place with such intensely interested and hardworking students as UChicago, the programs are a given - they wouldn’t come without them: as I said, I knew it was a good enough school before the visit. There are dozens, maybe even hundreds of schools that are good enough - once finding them, the real key is not which one has more Nobel Laureates or community service clubs or whatever: it’s which one has the student body and environment you (or rather, your D) most want to be around. For me it was UChicago, and while I feel incredibly luck to have ended up here, I know the last fantastic four years were not luck, but positive correlation. My sister similarly fell in love with the people at Trinity, and has had just as perfect a 2 years there so far as my own college experience - albeit, of a very different sort (they are very different schools, we are very different people). The people you want to be with are taking the courses you want to take, participating in the clubs you want to be in, going off to get the jobs you want to get. Once you’ve found schools that are good - and there are plenty of them beyond the typical top ten lists, the community you fit best in will support you best through your career there, and the rest, I truly believe, sort of takes care of itself.</p>