College? So much importance and meaning in that one word. So thrilling and yet so daunting. So simple and yet so complex. Who am I going to be and what am I going to do? As we are approaching are final days of high school, thoughts like this are becoming more and more common. They haunt us in our (limited) sleep, throughout dinners and study halls, follow us as we trudge to class or escape to Geneva on the weekends. We all have heard many names of eminent places, had images of glorious campuses and vague ideas and dreams about the one “dream college” we are going to of to and spend the best times of our lives in. But one cannot find the right place for himself by just following the sound of a famous name or a picture on Google Images. One has to visit the place and know how it is really like and search within ourselves to see if it would in fact be right for us. The goal of the trip was to understand the concepts behind a plethora of different colleges, their spirits, ideas, opportunities and requirements, in order to have a vision of the way we want to commence our adult lives. We certainly all want to start off on the right foot, and this trip was the first step to making sure that that would be the case.
1,739.5 kilometres, 7 days, 11 colleges. An experience and information filled journey from Atlanta to Boston, with a stop in vibrant New York. On this trip we visited a multitude of very diverse institutions — some large, others small, urban, rural, with diverse curricula, contrasting student bodies and unique quirky traditions. Our journey of exploration began in Emory, and was followed by Davidson, Duke, Princeton, NYU, Columbia, Fordham, Yale, Brown, Boston University and finished in Babson, at a point when college tours have begun to become absolutely unbearable. Yet even if our minds could no longer cope with hearing about the holistic admissions process, or the view of the standardised test scores (oh who hadn’t had enough taking those?) we were nonetheless able to understand the importance of all the information we had just gathered. For a good applicant is a prepared applicant — one that knows about the place he is applying to and sees his place in it. And what better way to gather that information than in the university from the admissions officers themselves?
Apart from touring the campuses and throughly questioning the poor student guides about what actually happens in the university (with our Brown and Babson guides cracking to reveal the most curious stories, to say the least, about how college life is actually like [you’ll be surprised…]) we (actually) had some free time to take advantage of the places we were visiting. They ranged from the-middle-of-nowhere little towns to pulsating metropolises with, as you can surely imagine, plenty of things to do, see and experience. It is the US after all, with its cities that never sleep and promises of freedom and joy for all.
Tired, jet-lagged and noticeably overwhelmed, we returned to Geneva on early Sunday morning. But with this unbearable seeming fatigue came a new energy — one of motivation, ambition and determination. For as we have seen, the fight for a place in those awe-inspiring universities is a tough one to be fought on many battlefields — in academics, extra-curriculums, in examination rooms and within ourselves against our own flaws and weaknesses. But it is one surely worth taking, in order to come return to these campuses once again, this time as a freshman of that one “dream college.” However for now, we have our university sweatshirts to remind us of our goals and hopefully helps us to keep going through all the challenging times to come.
By Katia
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