In late 2019, I was in my senior year of high school and applying to colleges! I lived in bliss, thinking about how I would get into some fantastic school and finally go live my dreams of doing, well, everything.
I applied to 26 schools in total! 26!
I remember telling this number to my friends and them thinking I was totally insane (and I am, but proud of it!)
I heard things like âWhy would you apply to that many?â or âWhat about all of the application fees?â or âI only applied to 4.â
This last comment usually came from people who a.) either knew exactly what they wanted to do (or thought they knew exactly what they wanted to do, because who actually knows what they want to do?) or b.) thought it was easier that way.
I had fantasies of me attending far-off, prestigious colleges like Oxford, and having that true, classic college experience at places like Yale or Harvard, or being surrounded by palm trees and wearing a red sweatshirt that read âStanfordâ, or becoming an Owl at one of my personal favorites, Rice University.
Before this whole crazy college application process, my parents took me on a college visit trip, and we visited a few colleges in Texas and on the east coast.
The real reason we went to Texas though was for Rice University in Houston. Iâd heard about it and read about it, and I think my parents were as intrigued as I was. The moment I stepped onto campus I knew that I had found it, the place I was meant to be.
It was beautiful and wide open with possibility, and they even had an engineering design kitchen! I mean, what even is that?! I didnât know, but as soon as I toured the place, I wanted more.
Rice was one of my many dreams. Part of their application process is submitting a picture to âThe Boxâ of something that is meaningful to you. I submitted this picture and unfortunately didnât get in:
So I guess we know now that Rice doesnât like chickens đ
We toured colleges like Swarthmore, UPenn, and more on that trip, but Rice never left my mind.
But back to application season.
I had compiled a momentous document of all the application questions I needed to answer to apply to these schools, and had to answer questions like âIf you could go back in time to any historical event, which event would it be and why?â or âDescribe the most impactful event in your life.â All of these questions felt like futile attempts to âget to know meâ. How can anyone really know a person just by reading something they wrote?
But I answered every single one of those questions because even though I pretended to dread having to write my life story and describe every aspect of myself, secretly I kind of loved it. It was all so exciting and I couldnât believe that I could be at one of those amazing places in less than a year.
When I was writing my answers to the Yale application questions, I wondered out loud what a person who went to Yale was called, and my father responded quite simply âA Yalien.â
I liked that answer, so I started my response off with talking about what life might be like as a Yalien. I didnât get in to Yale, I guess they didnât like that đŹ
Then COVID hit, and we all know how that went. Iâll spare you the details, but I was still excited and nervous about hearing back from all of these schools.
But then a strange thing happened. One by one, I heard back from these prestigious colleges, and it was a âNo, we donât think soâ from a lot of them.
It broke my heart, but I pretended it didnât. I pretended I was fine, and I kept waiting for more application decisions to be released.
I applied to 26 schools because a.) I have so many different interests and wasnât sure what I wanted to do, b.) was curious about where I would get in at and didnât want to limit my options, and c.) wanted to maximize my chances to getting into one of those awesome, Ivy league schools you hear so much about.
I went to the number high school in the country at the time, which was wonderful, but also wonderfully difficult in terms of course content. As a result, I didnât have the best of grades during my initial transition there.
And it sucks, because I think I was counted out of a lot of colleges because of that.
It didnât matter how great my essays were, how good my test scores were, or who I was as a person. I didnât have the grade portfolio they were looking for so I was a âNo, she will not attendâ.
So one by one, my romanticized dreams of college, finally figuring out my lifeâs purpose, meeting new people that would turn out to be my best friends for life, and making new memories, both stupid and meaningful, were ripped away.
Well, maybe not completely. Iâve always been a little over-dramatic.
Something great happened too. I was also accepted to one of the best engineering programs in the country at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
And it scared me because UIUC was the first college I applied to (I guess I really could have stopped right then writing applications) and I never actually believed it would be where I ended up going to school.
Being a homebody, I wanted that down-to-earth feel, that sense of community, a college with less people, a college that I felt connected to. I wanted a place I felt comfortable.
Comfort is overrated.
Because even though I always wanted that fantastical college feel, the romanticized version of my life, it wasnât exactly what I got, and sometimes you just have to roll with the punches, grow with the flow, make lemonade out of some quite wonderful lemons as it turns out.
From my first day onward at UIUC, I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, pushed myself to make the most of my experience, because damn it, I was at college, something a lot of people donât even get to experience.
And even though I didnât get what I thought was supposed to be the âclassicâ experience, I kind of did.
Entering college during the age of COVID makes you make some friends real fast, because we were all freshly graduated high school seniors that had been robbed of our senior year and were also incredibly lonely.
If I hadnât knocked on all of the doors in my dorm hallway that first day on campus, I wouldnât have met some of my now closest friends, made all of those crazy freshman year memories, studied abroad in Puerto Rico two summers ago, had my internship last summer, and so much more, and really not even have the life I have right now.
Itâs kind of funny how I started my college application journey thinking about how I would get into some fantastic school and finally go live my dreams of doing, well, everything, because as it turns out, I did, and well, Iâm well on my way to living my dreams.
I gave UIUC a chance, and in return it gave me one. I can think about the potential other experiences I didnât have and wallow in what might have been, or I can live right now and live what is, because my life is pretty good and is going to be pretty great, I can feel it.
I didnât become a Yalien đ˝ đľ , but I did become an Illini đđŤ and the orange and blue will get me through, because where I am right now is right where Iâm meant to be.
The orange and blue will also get me through because it has to. Itâs not all shiny, in fact much of it has not been shiny lately, with finals coming up, doubts about my major, and other challenges, but like they say in Top Gun: Maverick, itâs not the plane, itâs the pilot, and Iâve proved in the past that Iâm a pretty damn good pilot.
(But who knows? Maybe I will attend Rice for a masterâs. đ Only time will tell.)