@emmahuang: If you prefer to be “pushed to be the best you can be,” come to Cal (UC Berkeley)! 
“Anyway, to reiterate my acquired qualities at Cal: grit (guts, resilience, initiative, and tenacity), I had no idea how they came about. All I knew was the undergraduate education there was an unbelievable series of processes taken place in a “black-box” that took a collection of inputs and resources, performed some work with those inputs, and then yielded those qualities once you got out successfully from college. It’s just as simple as that.”
A passage quote from my thread, “my own public and private college exp. (Cal, Columbia, and Stanford).”