Senior Reflection #1 - Looking Forward

I've been conflicted for months over my naive optimism and the infinitely more probable reality that college will serve as a slightly more liberating extension of high school. Looking back, it's pretty astounding I've wound up where I am now. While selecting universities for applications, I was primarily considering in-state, as well as Carnegie Mellon and UPenn as hopeful alternatives, given public universities couldn't offer the specialized mathematics and statistics curriculum I've worked to convince myself I'm interested in. I've actually been surprisingly decisive looking back, as many applications required specific essays outlining my academic upbringing in a specific section, and statistics appeared as an interesting and economically viable path to follow, if only for the short term. Facing the approaching deadline for sending semester transcripts, I sporadically handed in envelopes for Cornell and Johns Hopkins on the final day of mailing acceptance, and looking back, that may have been the greatest, and only beneficial impulse I've ever followed. The Hopkins-specific essays were surprisingly easy to approach, and served as a template for my remaining essays.

Following some excessively extravagant acceptance booklets, Hopkins sent its acceptance notice in an initially off-putting manner, in the form of a one paragraph email without a photograph in site. Being my first destination for college tours, I was under the impression my brief experiences there would quickly be overshadowed, but I made the retrospectively wonderful decision to attend a non-event day to first experience a simple campus and housing tour. Six accepted students and I were given the full treatment shared by the 140,000 unfortunate souls drowning in the sea of salmon-colored, tailored shorts and boat shoes that was UVA's Days on the Lawn, and this specialized treatment allowed for personal questioning with various students and professors. I was pretty immediately surprised by how much I preferred the campus to Tech's which I had toured numerous times given my brother just graduated, as I had always found larger campuses more appealing. I certainly didn't get the undefinable feeling of belonging that so many prophesize, but on my intentionally long trip to the car, the idea of living in such a place was at least conceivable, instantly putting it above most of my other candidates. In the end, it was Hopkins' specialized Applied Mathematics and Statistics program that drew me in, as its affiliation with the engineering department was infinitely more convincing than Carnegie's overpopulated humanities degree in statistics. That and Carnegie didn't have a central dining hall, which I'll never be able to wrap my head around. Oh well, off to Homewood!