My senior year of high school, college applications consumed 98 percent of my life. They were agonizingly stressful. They created tensions in my household and made me feel on edge. My high school was wildly unhelpful in the college process, not only during the actual application mayhem but also in the fact that they fed students a mentality of specialness, of greatness, that implied we transcended average high school students. We were better, more prepared, viable candidates for the top colleges. Because I was a top student at my high school, the automatic assumption was that I must be a top student in comparison to every high school. This is, unfortunately, not the case.

And because of my misguided beliefs about the way college applications work, accompanied by my own elitist opinions, I was aiming high. I applied to incredibly competitive private institutions, the price tag of which barely registered in my mind. With all of the other stressors in my life, I placed “tuition and fees” in the “to deal with later” pile, a fact that dramatically altered my college experience just a few months in. I desperately wanted to apply early decision to one school in particular. My father sat me down just two months before the application was due, weeks after I’d submitted the rest of them, and told me it just wasn’t feasible. That nowhere I applied was feasible.

As anyone who was once in that position can attest, it is devastating. I worked hard all of high school and expected it to pay off in a big way so that I could say that I was accepted to a prestigious university, so that I could prove something to myself. This left me with only one option: last-ditch efforts to save myself from winding up at my only backup, a school I had no desire to attend. There entered USC.

I applied to the University of South Carolina on a whim. I was at my family’s house in Florida for my aunt’s baby shower, and her best friend gave me the advice I needed to hear right then: “It’s not worth it to spend all of your money on your undergrad. Go somewhere you can afford, and make it count. Work hard. Build connections. Save your money for later.” My father was at home and sent me a picture of a letter that USC had sent me inviting me to apply. And so I did, out of desperation and uncertainty.

That was the greatest decision I have ever made, even if it wasn’t fully formed or really a conscious choice at all. Even if it was purely accidental, forged from a scared high school senior’s desire to pull herself out of the hole she felt trapped in at the time. But the first time I set foot on the campus at the University of South Carolina, I realized that I was home. It felt right, like this was the place that I was supposed to be all along.

I held out on fully committing just so that I could hear from that one school, and (as I suspected would occur – their admittance rate for early decision is markedly higher than their regular decision) I was waitlisted. That same day, I denied my spot on the waitlist and submitted my deposit to USC.

My aunt’s best friend had been right, of course. My experience thus far in college has been unparalleled. It’s been challenging, rigorous and incredibly worthwhile. It has presented opportunities that I doubt I would have ever been able to locate otherwise. It introduced me to lifelong friends, to future endeavors, to the people that I could be calling my colleagues in a few years. I wasn’t accepted to my dream school, but I found somewhere that I can call home and to which I look forward to returning every time I leave, and that’s something incredibly special.

The University of South Carolina was an accident, for me. But every day is a conscious choice to make my time here worth more, to make every second I spend on this campus count. And I am so interminably grateful for that.