When I went to college, a lot of people told me it was where I would find myself. I heard many times about how the next four years would be the best of my life, how lucky I was to be able to attend a private college, how grateful I should be that I had earned enough scholarships to go there. And I was excited and nervous, and all of the things that an incoming freshman is supposed to be. My first week, I made close friends in my orientation group, I attended the best English class I'd ever taken, I ate ice cream for breakfast. Life was good.
Until, suddenly, it wasn't.
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Around November, I started to realize that the excited feeling was wearing off. I started hearing things about my new school, things that I didn't like. I breezed through my introductory classes and found English less interesting than I'd expected. One day, after an annual symposium on Race and Ethnic Studies, someone posted racist threats targeting the school's black students, in what I would soon learn was an inextricably repetitive pattern. I felt unchallenged, and more than that, I felt unsatisfied. If college was supposed to be so exciting, then why wasn't I more excited about it? If my private school was so exclusive and wonderful, why did I dislike it? Was there something wrong with me?
This feeling persisted until the following February, when I made the decision, with two weeks to go until the application deadline, that I would apply to transfer schools. It was incredibly last-minute, meaning I had to scramble for letters of recommendation and put my poor advisor through a lengthy struggle with the Common Application, perhaps the least intuitive piece of software ever created. I wrote all of my essays in one frenzied night. I was planning to apply to four schools, but I ended up choosing just two: Reed College in Portland, my school's more prestigious relative, and Columbia University in New York, which had been my dream school the first time I applied. I wasn't sure if I would get into either- in fact, I doubted it. But once I'd clicked submit, the panicked feeling I'd had for months went away. I was no longer trapped. I had given myself a choice.
And then, with two months left in the semester, I threw myself into being there. It was partially a conscious decision, a reaction to what I'd done, but in other ways, it was something I can't explain. I've never experienced such an extreme change in such a short time in my life. I started hanging out with my close friends more. I wrote a 20-page research paper on a topic I was genuinely excited about. I went on my first date with my now-boyfriend, exactly a week after I submitted my application. After almost a year of writer's block, I opened a gently-used notebook and started writing stories again.
And suddenly, I found, life was good. I didn't feel any more positively towards my school as an institution, true, but I felt like I was doing real work there, work that was important, at least, to me. Part of it must have been that for the first time in months, I wasn't nervous or unsatisfied- I was just happy. Really happy.
I packed up and left for home in May without saying more than temporary goodbyes- why would I have? I hadn't forgotten about my applications, but I didn't think about them constantly. I joked with my mom about getting the annual "Ivy League rejection email."
And then, a week later, I got the letter saying I'd been accepted at Columbia.
I told almost no one. It might seem strange that I didn't, but the news for me wasn't exactly celebratory: it was a reminder that the happiness I had been feeling was temporary. I went to a school that was not prestigious, that was not diverse, that would never help me be an editor or an author or live in New York or do any of the things I really wanted to do. Columbia would help me do that, or at least, I thought it would. But it would also mean giving up on the life I'd been creating for myself.
The time that elapsed between the receipt of that letter and the decision deadline in June was some of the most difficult of my life. I thought about my acceptance constantly, but when I talked to my friends from school and home I never mentioned it, not because I thought they would hold it against me, but because I feared that talking to them would somehow make it harder for me to make a decision. I felt sick, and tired, exactly the opposite of how I'd expected to feel. I had given myself a choice to make, and now that it had come due I didn't want to have to make it.
A lot of factors went into my eventual decision to stay. I made the call that I thought was healthiest, smartest and most beneficial for me. And there were economic and social factors as well, as there are with everything. But it eventually came down to what was going to make me happy, something that I was uncomfortable considering, but something that I'm lucky I even could consider.
I realized how much of my decision had been based on my desire to trade up, to do what I'd been told to do since I was in middle school and my straight A's marked me as someone who should always be striving for better- to go for prestige, not personal happiness. And so, quite simply, I refused to do that. It may be that later in life when my liberal arts degree doesn't get me as far as I want it to, I will think twice about the choice I made. Even now, I often think twice about it.
But seven months on, reflecting on what I chose, I can't say that I regret it.
Being where I am has given me an incredible number of opportunities. I am double-majoring in English and Anthropology, I'm slowly but steadily learning Russian, and I plan to study abroad, all things I wouldn't have had the time to do otherwise. I work an educational and wonderful job in my college's Human Resources department that, surprisingly, doesn't require me to feel positively about my school all the time. I get to work as a journalist and editor for this very site. And I get to spend my days working, taking classes that finally feel right for me, and seeing people I love, people who I've been building relationships with over the past year and a half and who affect me in positive ways every day.
It's not that I suddenly think my school is perfect. It isn't. This year has given me no delusions about that. But I've realized that no school is. There is no place I could be at this point in my life that would make me completely happy- it just isn't that simple. Maybe that's a depressing feeling to have, but it's true, at least for me. When you open yourself up to making choices, some of them will leave you feeling unsatisfied, uneasy, even regretful. And it's entirely possible that there is no clear "best choice" for you to make, that whatever you do, you're going to find yourself asking what your life would have been like had you gone the other way. But it's also true that everyone has those turning points in their life, all the time. Choosing where you go to school isn't the most dramatic of them, not by far.
If you're thinking about applying to transfer, I would encourage you to go ahead with it- apply, and see where that takes you. If you never try, as cliché as it sounds, you'll never know how much you're capable of. Apply, and then throw yourself into life where you are. Try new things, meet new people, try to see the place you're at in a new light. Maybe you'll find that it's not the right place for you, and you'll move on. Maybe you'll find a reason to stay. But either way, know that just because you are not happy somewhere, it doesn't mean that you're broken. Just because you don't feel the same way as everyone else seems to doesn't mean there's something wrong with you- in fact, it's likely some of the people you know are feeling the same way you do. And whatever you choose, whether you leave or stay, it's going to turn out okay. Life keeps going. I promise.
