Why Carolina?
In my mind I’m gone to Carolina
By the fall of my senior year of high school, everyone seemed to have some idea about where to go to college. Everyone, that is, except me.
While my friends wrote essays and wrapped up applications, I watched the pile of college catalogues sitting in my bedroom grow bigger and bigger. While others narrowed down their lists of prospective schools and mailed completed applications, I tried to convince my parents that the best way to ensure that I got into the right college was to apply to as many as possible.
Unsurprisingly, my parents weren’t thrilled about my plan. When they gave a firm “no” to my request to let every one of the nation’s 3,000 colleges know of my existence, I trimmed my list to a more reasonable number. However, even condensing my list didn’t solve all of my problems, especially when I received acceptance letters from several of my top choices. All of the schools that I considered were so different from one another—a few were small and private, others were larger and public, one was in the country, another in the middle of a city—and I wasn’t sure which would fit me best.
In my opinion, the most valuable way of figuring out where I wanted to go would be to simply spend a semester at each school so that I’d really get a feel for the campus rather than just basing my decision on glossy guidebook pictures. Since this was impossible, I had to settle for the next best thing: visiting, or in some cases, revisiting each school.
Although these visits didn’t cement my decision, they helped point me in the right direction. For example, one campus that I had fallen in love with during a summer visit no longer seemed as inviting when I returned in the spring and saw what it was like when students were actually there. One stressed-out student told me that if I came to the school, I would have to stay up until all hours, work as hard as I could and probably still earn C’s like everyone else did. However, even his harsh words about hard work, which I was used to, didn’t bother me as much as my host student’s attitude. After being more than two hours late to meet me, greeting me without an apology and telling me that there was no time to drop off my suitcase so I’d have to drag it around campus all day, she ended the evening by bringing me to a play with other prospective students and going back to her dorm, leaving me alone and lost at 11 p.m. With another student’s help, I finally made it back to her dorm and got a few hours of sleep, only to be woken up before the sun rose and dropped off at the almost empty Office of Undergraduate Admissions while she went to band practice. By the time my mom picked me up several hours later, I was ready to jump in the car and drive away as fast I could. While it’s possible that I picked a bad day to visit or got stuck with the wrong student, the experience didn’t make me itch to return to the campus any time soon. The school moved toward the bottom of my list before it was later crossed off entirely.
By April, just a few weeks before the deadline to accept admission offers, I had narrowed my list to two schools, one of which was Carolina. Weeks later, even closer to the deadline, I finally mailed in my acceptance to the offer of admission. I was going to be a Tar Heel!
At first, Carolina seemed like the last place I would go, even though I had heard nothing but good things about it from the dozens of people I knew who had either gone there or were there now. Hearing such positive reviews actually decreased my desire to go to the school. I wanted to go to someplace more exciting, someplace few people from my high school attended or had even heard of, someplace that was further than an hour from my home. But applying to UNC seemed like a rite of passage in my high school and it did have one of the nation’s best journalism programs, so I decided to apply anyways. Besides, I had visited during my junior year and it hadn’t been a bad experience. The people were friendly, the professors seemed engaged in teaching and the campus was beautiful. A return visit deepened my interest in the school, but I still wasn’t sure about it. It was almost too close to my home, it was so big, and, while I didn’t doubt that it was a quality school, I just wasn’t sure that it was right for me.
During the rest of the winter, I tried to learn as much about Carolina as possible. I studied statistics like classroom sizes and majors offered and listened to stories from people who had gone there. Thanks to my investigation, when I received an acceptance letter in January, I was more excited about the prospect of going to UNC than ever before. More than any of my other options, it seemed to have an excellent balance of scholarship and service, of hard work and of having fun. However, what can I say? I’m indecisive and still wasn’t entirely ready to commit to it.
As the months left to choose a college became weeks, I still hadn’t made up my mind, so I decided to make one last trip to Carolina. I arrived in Chapel Hill a few weeks after my nightmarish visit to the college just described. After my time at that school, it was refreshing to come to Chapel Hill and have a wonderful visit. My tour guide was friendly and willing to answer the barrage of questions we shot at her, the other students seemed busy but not so stressed that they didn’t have time to hold open doors or give directions and the professors in the classes I visited actually made me excited about the prospect of going to class. There wasn’t one specific aspect of that visit that made me decide to choose Carolina, but somehow the whole experience, tied with everything I had already learned about the University, encouraged me to finally claim my spot in its class of 2008.
As I drove to orientation a few months later and turned onto the road that led to Chapel Hill, James Taylor’s “Carolina in My Mind” came on the radio. Coincidence? Maybe, but even so it was a coincidence that made me feel like I’d made the right decision about college. My orientation experience confirmed my choice. Even though I got lost several times and class registration was a bit of a headache, I returned home excited about the people I met and the campus I would spend the next four years exploring.
Two years later, I’m still enjoying life as a Tar Heel. Carolina may not be perfect, but it is an excellent fit for me. Perhaps taking my time with the college application process wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
