Chapter 6: The Watering Hole

September 2005-May 2006

There’s something about that second year of college that feel very much like a freight train when it hits.  Sophomores: beware Murphy’s Law.  If it can go wrong, it most assuredly will, and you fall harder and longer than any freshman imagines.  For me, I should have known right from the start that my sophomore year was hardly going to be the blissful, if uneventful experience that my freshman year at HC was.  For starters, the night before move in day in the fall, I was unlucky enough to stumble across some horrible and shocking family troubles that had been previously way under my radar; let’s just say that my relationship with my mother has not been the same since that night.  And, to top it off, as I was driving the two and a half hours down to HC, I was pulled over for the first time in my life and given a speeding ticket for a whopping $120.  So, really I should have known that it just wasn’t going to be a good year.

In minor events, I was living with a fellow modern languages double major who was every bit as antisocial as I was in her own way, but I didn’t mind, at least not initially.  I was perfectly content within my new ring of dorm mates, creating nerf gun wars with the boys in the building next door and terrorizing the innocent freshmen on the hall with our marshmallow shooters.  It was fun, and they probably stopped me from becoming completely insane by the end of the first month.  In terms of classes, I was taking five that semester in order to fully accommodate all my LADRs, including my Natural World science sequence.  That meant that my three-day a week schedule was now a five day a week schedule, and the homework was, at the very least, doubled.  I was a little out of my element, and though I was perfectly comfortable in my French course, I was monumentally uncomfortable with the level of Spanish that was suddenly being required of me.

My Spanish professor that first semester should be a legend at HC among the modern language students, perhaps even in the student body at large.  Recently, a freshman even created a Facebook Fan Group for José-Manuel, and it is well deserved.  Still, my first encounter with him was terrifying; not only was he my first real encounter with a peninsular accent (you know, the kind of lispy one), but he was fast and incredibly difficult.  I had to work double time to keep up with that course.  To make matters worse, José-Manuel likes nothing more than to tease and/or make fun of his students, especially if he thinks they can only half understand him. I got teased a lot, but I’m pleased to say that I improved quite a bit that semester and even managed to pull off a decent grade.  I should also mention, in the object of fairness, that José-Manuel is a very good professor despite the high level of difficulty and strictness usually associated with his classes, and HC would be exceptionally lucky to have more than one professor of his caliber.

Unfortunately, it was during that first semester that the seeds of discontent that had been sown my freshman year began to fully germinate.  The Mail Order Brides (the name we had given our little group of friends freshman year) were disintegrating quickly.  As some of us came into our own, others were hurt and left behind, and while my new dorm mates were excellent friends that I wouldn’t trade, it was hard to lose the friends I had on top of the family troubles that were now raging at home.  It was then that I began pondering leaving HC.

It was nothing short of the trifecta of misery for me at the time: classes that were too hard and certainly not quick to reward, friends that were at best inconstant, and in short: less than a handful of reasons to stay.  The first of my complaints is one that is common enough from college students, particularly at HC, and the reason for that is multi-faceted.  In my experience, many professors approach their classes as if it is (or should be) the most important class in any given student’s repertoire, and of course, this just isn’t the truth.  In fact, as a sophomore, I was still in beginner classes (aside from my French and Spanish classes) that I was only taking to fulfill requirements for my Liberal Arts Degree.  I personally had very little interest in memorizing enzymes that surely fascinated the future Biology majors with whom I shared the classroom.

Still, it was the second reason that was the most troublesome for me in particular.  It was clear that at school, who my friends were depended entirely on with whom and where I lived. It was a harsh realization to understand that each year would bring a completely fresh start from which I would have to regain my confidence and comfort level.  To top it off, as the first semester drew to a close, my relationship with my less than outgoing roommate was crumbling, due mostly to conflicting opinions on religious and social tendencies.  That is to say, she is essentially my foil in those departments. The final straw that semester was a visit from a friend of hers, a boy, to stay in our room the weekend before finals.  Not only was this boy a person I had never met, but his religious views were even more staunch than hers, and I’m rather disappointed to say that she presented him with a sharply contrasting portrait than we were accustomed to living with.  Consequently, she chided me for swearing despite the fact that she has been known to swear quite liberally at her computer, and a common friend of ours, who happened to be a member of a fraternity, was publicly deemed un-Christian for drinking at parties.  It was an ugly end of term.

However, just before Christmas vacation, I had signed up for and paid in full for a Spring Term study abroad trip (with none other than José-Manuel as one of the two fabulous professors leading the trip), and it was that trip that kept me rooted to HC.  So, it was with mixed feelings that I returned to HC for the winter semester. And then something happened that I never expected.  My best friend, another one of us who had been hurt, more so than myself, came to me one day with interesting news: she had accepted a bid to a sorority.  I knew they had been sending her bids (invitations to join) before, but she had never accepted.  Then one day shortly after the Winter semester began, she did.  At first, I’ll confess, I was disappointed.  Greek Life had yet to entice me with anything other than loud chanting and alcohol.  But that was about to change.

 

Chapter 5: Christo

August 2004-May 2005

There are few things that new freshman, at least at a school like HC, should be prepared for when starting classes for the first time. While you may have read all about small class sizes in a brochure, that is nothing compared to actually sitting in a classroom of four students (which coincidentally was the size of my French course my first semester). My largest class during my first semester had a grand total of nineteen students; this was shocking both initially to me and continually to all my friends attending larger universities. Of course, not only does this mean that I had to come to class with my homework done (on most occasions) but also that I had to come to class! That’s right; HC has attendance policies, which completely shut down any hopes of a mostly class-free schedule with lots of down time. Still, my first semester schedule was pretty perfect; most weeks, I had class on three days a week and only for four hours a day. So, while I did have to actually attend my classes, much to the amazement of my friends at Purdue, there still wasn’t too much class.

All in all, my classes for my first year were fairly typical of the classes I would be taking for the remainder of my time at HC. I absolutely loathed philosophy; I had no idea what the point of the course was, and I never felt specifically philosophical while studying for it. My experience with theology was a different thing; I had expected to feel about it much the same way I had felt about philosophy. However, it was more interesting and informative that philosophy had ever hoped to be. My French and Spanish courses were actually not as exciting as I had anticipated; I wasn’t used to being the youngest, most inexperienced student in the classroom, and that was certainly the case for my first year. And, since all of the modern language courses are literature based in content, I spent the majority of homework time bent over a dictionary. However, I am exceedingly glad now that I began taking the French and Spanish courses so early because by the time I was a junior, the work load and expectations became second nature and far less foreign.

It is now time to revisit the studio art portion of my required freshman class. The course was a Great Works sequence called, “Beauty” with, as I may have mentioned before, a studio art portion. Typically, Great Works courses are meant to teach freshman three things: how to analyze a work of literature or art or music (thus, the Great Works), write a paper, and give a presentation. Of course, Beauty did all of those things for me, but in addition, I learned quite a bit about HC’s illustrious studio art department. I must take a moment to delve a little into the two professors that lead my session of Beauty; they are by far two of more interesting characters at HC and two of the most mismatched teaching partners I could make. On one hand, there was the vaguely hippie, feminist English professor, who occasionally brought her two children to class, and on the other hand was the off-the-wall, eccentric art professor, who usually seemed to be performing a class rather than lecturing it (she frequently reminded me of Professor Trelawney of the Harry Potter series, if you’re familiar with it).

Needless to say, with such incredible characters to lead this newly created class, Beauty was full of adventures for us unsuspecting freshmen. We drew grid drawings, charcoal portraits, self-portraits, portraits without paint (or any other recognizable art genre), and even made works of art out of leaves and twigs on the biology trails. It was challenging, particularly as I compared with other students in my class some of whom were actually studio art majors. But, I’ll never forget my first paper/presentation at HC. Of course, it came from Beauty, and I was terrified. I had already been introduced to the more severe grading that controls the GPAs of HC Students, and I’m sorry to say that my 4.0+ from high school quickly became a thing of the past. So, as I was randomly assigned a work of art to research, analyze, write a paper on, and give a presentation over, I was literally quaking in my seat.

My work of art was by a man named Christo, who I had never of before at the time, and the piece itself was called Valley Curtain. Now, this art professor was a wily one, and she had given each of us a work of art that is or was contemporary, modern art; needless to say, there were absolutely zero paintings. In case you’re not familiar with Valley Curtain, it was exactly as the title suggests: a giant curtain made of bright orange nylon had been constructed between two relatively small mountains in Colorado, thus creating a curtain in the shape of the valley. To point out the immensity of this curtain, please take a moment to look closely at the ground just underneath the curtain in the picture; yes, those are people wandering around down there. You can imagine that my fears about this paper and presentation, which now rested on my ability to analyze a giant orange, nylon curtain, were now confirmed and doubled over. I discovered something the following week that I was lucky in my art assignment; a classmate of mine was actually assigned a room full of peacocks as her work of art. So, I stressed and sweated my way through a five-page paper and ten minute long presentation that I somehow managed to give without revealing my internal doubts and suspicions about my analysis. Somehow, I scraped my way through to an A- on my first ever HC   project. I was thrilled beyond belief and still today count it as one of my little victories at HC.

Another noteworthy experience of my freshman year was the blessed Spring Term. For the entire month of May at HC, students take only one course, which means many glorious, sun-filled afternoons without a full schedule and the fear of final exams. Spring Term is how college should be all the time. Other important notes about my first experience include my decision to take a break from my extracurricular overload from high school. I was thoroughly uninterested in clubs, committees, or even Greek Life. In fact, I found those things unnecessary. However, despite having managed to create/find a rather solid friend base of with a few girls from my hallway, I drove home nearly every weekend for the first year. I attended only a few fraternity parties, and I didn’t give the sororities a second glance. Consequently, I ended my first year with the feeling that something was lacking; sure, life at HC was great, and in general, I enjoyed it, but I was sure that I was missing something, and I was determined to find it.

 

Chapter 4: The Orientation Experience

August 2004

I’ve yet to discover any college or university that doesn’t run some sort of first year orientation for their students, whether its for a Saturday afternoon in the summer or right before the start of classes in the fall. My first year orientation at HC lasted a full week, which was several days more than anyone else’s at the time. I discovered the motivation behind our long orientation week right away; it seemed that I had stumbled into HC at the start of a completely new academic program. In other words, my freshman class the guinea pig class, but we didn’t really know that yet. What we did know is that we were HC’s largest class, weighing in at around 300 students give or take, and we were the first to experience The August Experience.

We were forcibly acquainted with our Resident Assistants (R.A.s) on the first day as we moved into our non-air-conditioned dorm rooms in the 90-degree southern Indiana heat, and shortly thereafter, we met with our Peer Advisors (P.A.s). These were first of many acronyms that would begin to dot my college career. Anyway, as it turns out, we were broken into groups of about 12 or 15 students per P.A. and it was the P.A.’s job to lead us through this brand new orientation week. It wasn’t a job I envied them; after all, most of the orientation events weren’t specifically mandatory, though there weren’t exactly voluntary either. That includes the intense midnight pep session in the gymnasium that was supposedly one giant ice breaker/get-to-know-you/team building exercise. Like I said, it was intense…

The majority of our orientation week consisted of a series of “classes” that we were to have with our P.A. groups, each group with it’s own member of HC’s faculty. In these classes, we were to all discuss and write one paper on our assigned summer reading, Into the Wild, and yes, HC assigned us summer reading before we’d even registered for a class. I have to confess, I didn’t read Into the Wild until I arrived at HC which supposedly put me a little behind my new classmates, but quite honestly, I didn’t notice much of difference, which leads me to believe that I wasn’t alone in starting my college procrastination tradition as early as possible. However, the intent of these mock class sessions was clear: welcome to HC, now get to work. We were supposed to learn what would be expected of us from our college professors, and to a certain degree, it worked. But, as my essay was hardly marked and certainly not graded by my faculty group leader, I think I must have missed the point.

There however other important parts of orientation week that I did experience. Naturally, we peppered our P.A., Amy, with dozens of questions as it related to HC life. She was a senior, affiliated to the sorority Chi Omega, and I believe a Theology major or something like it. Also, there were elections to chose the first year delegates to the Student Senate, philanthropy activities, placement exams, field games, hikes around HC’s extensive trails, and even a late night bonding and team building exercise in the Horner Center. It was an impressive, if slightly dull and not too thrilling, itinerary meant to get us through our first week at HC.

Still, as the week wound down, we had yet to complete the final step that would cement us in as HC students: registration. After our various placement exam scores were calculated (I took two, one in French and one in Spanish, to the never-ending amazement of my dorm neighbor), we scheduled meetings with our Faculty Advisors who were to guide us through the registration process (mercifully, Faculty Advisors don’t have acronyms). My advisor, who would remain my advisor for the duration of my HC career, was the slightly eccentric but astonishingly brilliant French professor, Dr. Dalka. She too was slightly amazed by my two placement exam scores, which allowed me to begin French and Spanish both at the advanced level. Unfortunately, she showed just as little understanding for the complicated registration options as I did.

In simple terms, under the new academic plan, students were required to complete certain courses known as Liberal Arts Degree Requirements (LADRs) along with certain courses in the student’s chosen major. The LADR requirements fall under different areas of study including Examined Life (theology and philosophy), Modern Societies (psychology, sociology, anthropology, history), Abstract and Formal Reasoning (mathematics and English), Natural World (biology, psychology, chemistry), World Languages (German, Spanish, French), Other Cultures (all-encompassing as it pertains to non-western culture), and Great Works (multi-disciplinary first year courses). Naturally, of these LADRs have their own acronyms.

Now, it’s a seeming simple task, choosing your classes, but as a freshman, I obviously had no idea what I was looking for, and with a new system, Dr. Dalka honestly didn’t either. I was required to register for a Great Works course, and I didn’t make into my first choice, my second choice, my third choice, or my fourth choice. Instead, I wound up in an 8 a.m. course with a studio art portion (we’ll come back to that later). With my placement exam scores at hand, Dr. Dalka immediately put me into her Introduction to French Literature course and a Spanish conversation course as well after she realized that I had taken the Spanish exam, too. That left one open spot, which we eventually managed to fill with a “linked” Examined Life sequence in philosophy and theology.

I should mention a little more dull detail about the Registrar’s Office, as many of you college students out there will sympathize with the semi-yearly fight to schedule courses. There are a few factors that the college student will be looking for in the perfect course schedule: no classes before 10 a.m., a convenient lunch break sometime between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., and of course, the not so tiny problem of finding classes that are both interesting and not too tough in terms of the syllabus. Also, you’re looking at the professor and the commentary on the course by the upper classmen. Consequently, much of the end of my orientation experience was spent hustling back and forth across the sunny quad from Dr. Dalka’s office in Old Science Hall to the Administration Building attempting to be signed into all the appropriate classes.

At the end of the week, I, along with the other freshmen, watched as the campus slowly but surely filled with all the upper classmen returning for another year of classes, which included my roommate. She was a transfer student that somehow escaped the orientation experience and yet wound up with me, a freshman, as her roommate. And so on the traditional Labor Day Monday, I finally began that vastly daunting and incredible foray into college.

 

Chapter 3: Graduation

Spring 2004

If you think about it, Graduation is one giant contradiction. It simultaneously marks the end of four years of grueling high school and the beginning of…something else. Naturally, at graduation ceremonies, they will try to tell you not to think about it as a end but instead as a beginning, but if you look it up in the dictionary, it will say something along the lines of “conferral or receipt of an academic degree or diploma marking completion of studies” (dictionary.com). Either way, beginning or end, it is an experience that is at least noteworthy.

We, the senior class, had long since picked up our exceptionally stylish cap and gown sets from the school office. Mine was white and horribly see-through. The guys at Centerville wear royal blue, and the girls wear white. But, it doesn’t stop there because there is also a very strict graduation dress code for what you must wear under the horribly see-through white gown: more white. But, the never-ending quest for the perfect white sun dress to wear under our gowns at least distracted us from contemplating a much more difficult and frankly terrifying aspect of graduation: What happens now? While we were all shopping and discussing the perfect dress and the perfect shoes that would hopefully arrange us so that we were exactly the same height (thereby ensuring that we would be seated relatively close to one another in the mass of blue and white gowns) we were not thinking of our final days in the familiar hallways.

Still, we’re all marching inexorably toward the day when we will no longer be high school students, bound to our four periods a day, math, science, and English routines. And suddenly, we find that we are sitting in the gymnasium on a Friday morning listening to one lucky teacher explain that we have to learn to walk in order to graduate. The mass chaos of lining up the 110 graduating seniors in two separate lines beginning with the shortest and ending with the tallest in boy girl boy and girl boy girl pattern is nothing less than hilarious. But at last, we’ve managed to form the lines in which we will process in and out of the gymnasium during ceremony.

Then it’s time to actually practice: we fail miserably. We’re informed at eighteen years old that we can’t walk, and we will stay as long as it takes for us to successfully march in and out at the proper pace (a.k.a. the tempo of the Processional). It takes us three attempts, and the band is getting exceptionally bored at their end of the gym floor. But, now that we’ve finally made it to our seats, we hear the shortened version of the actual graduation ceremony, which by and large requires absolutely nothing from us until we get to the part about extracurricular activities. As the principal reads each club or activity, we are instructed to stand for about two seconds after each organization we are a part of. For some, it’s a long, dull list of meaningless club meetings, but for others like myself, it is a hilarious ten minutes of constant up and downs that deserved a chuckle.

So it was that the senior class spent the final day of school. And the next day, Saturday, we gathered again for the Senior Awards presentation. If anything, this was a perfunctory meeting to announce the valedictorian (the great great guy whose locker was next to my own and whose class I was in from Kindergarten until middle school) and salutatorian (my best friend). In terms of statistics, our graduating class of 2004 set the record for both the highest number of dropouts our senior year (I think it was close to forty) and the highest number of Academic Honors and Core 40 Diplomas awarded (close to thirty). Out of the one hundred and ten seniors, I was statistically ranked number 6. But hey, who was counting? I already made it to college.

And at last, we’ve arrived; it’s Graduation Day at Centerville High School. Our families pouring into the over-crowded and stifling gymnasium, the seniors gather one last time as high school students in the auditorium, vaguely forming the same lines from rehearsal. In a strange blur, its time to go and we attempt valiantly to process in correctly while searching the bleachers for our families and not to trip on the fake blue carpet in high heels. Seated at last, the ceremony begins, the speeches, the introductions, etc.

And then its my turn; as the secretary of the senior class, it is oddly enough my duty during Graduation to light the class unity candle while the treasurer reads one Robert Frost poem or another. I go calmly to the stand with candle while Sam begins her poem. I’ve practiced (yes, I’m the kind of person who practices for that sort of thing), and I’m ready. And then, the candlewick breaks off during my slightly nervous attempts to light the candle. Panicking, I try again, and again, and again, and again with absolutely no results except vague laughter from whatever audience members are looking at me rather than Sam. To top it off, I’m running out of matches. Great. My last act as a class officer is to fail horribly and publicly to light a candle. Sam finishes the poem right on cue, and the candle is still stubbornly unlit in the middle of the gym floor. So, I bail. As I return to my seat, I make the mistake of looking up at the faculty section of the audience, which is right in front of me. The person I happen to see: my pre-calculus teacher who also happens to be the National Honors Society supervisor, and she is laughing a lot. At that point, I think I had my most embarrassing high school moment.

As they say, the show must go on, and it did, despite my minor fiasco. So, we all played on, with more speeches, the class video which lovingly displayed our baby pictures alongside our senior pictures, and of course the extracurricular roll call (I’m pleased to report that there was quite a bit of chuckling from the audience at that point). Then of course, there was the endless parade of students up to the stage to shake the superintendent’s hand and take our completely meaningless diploma holders. Then of course, we had to add insult to injury as the class officers, myself included, went up to the unity candle (still not burning) to light our own candles. We had a nice little laugh to ourselves as we used the remaining matches to light our own candles before moving out to light the candles along the rows of students. And that brought us to the end, the tassel flip, the nonexistent hat toss, and the recessional out of the gymnasium as newly made graduates.

Now, let’s rewind a moment to the empty diploma holders we all carried out of the gymnasium. Directly following the ceremony, we all went to the cafeteria where we were unceremoniously awarded our actual diplomas. To me, this completely negated the point of having a graduation ceremony; after all, what was the point of walking on to the stage to get my diploma if my English teacher was going to actually hand me the diploma an hour later in the jam-packed cafeteria? In addition to our diplomas, we also received the senior class t-shirt, which I never wore, not even to bed. It was giant and scratchy and frankly, not even close to being attractive in any way with its giant bulldog and 2008 logo. Though, true to my nature, I’m pretty sure I still have it.

 

Chapter 2: Payoffs

2003-2004

Aside from the college applications, or lack thereof in my case, my senior year of high school certainly had its ups and downs.  On one hand, I was a class officer and member of more clubs than I can possibly remember, there are the fond memories of the English Academic Team (E.A.T rocks), working in the office as a peer helper and hanging out with my favorite office workers and staff instead of in SRT, hilarious class memories, and of course, the wonderful people I knew and loved.  And on the other hand was my continuing family drama and saga, a budding relationship turned sour by his family’s bouts of alcoholism, and only a few weeks before graduation, the untimely death of a close friend’s brother.  It was a sobering year that was good and bad, which prepared me far better for what came later than I thought at the time.

For starters, my senior year was a year of payoffs. All those years of boring class schedules and diligent note taking paid off in more than just my 4.0.  As a senior, I was known and liked by my teachers, which may sound snobby, but it actually afforded an interesting perk: if a teacher knows that you’re not taking advantage of your little liberties, you’re likely to get more little liberties.  Consequently, I was out of class roaming the halls more often than I was in some classes, and that was fun.  For example, at the end of each Calculus class, we were given at least forty-five minutes to work on homework, and because there were nine of the best students in the school in that class, we very rarely worked on homework.  I remember a lot of Slime Volleyball on the computer and rolling chair races in the hallway.

Additionally, after years of slaving away as a club officer, especially as it relates to planning prom my junior year, I found myself more or less at the top of the hierarchy.  I was a senior peer helper, officer of the Spanish National Honors Society, French Club, and Green Club, and by the end of the first semester, I had been accepted to the college of my choice with a lovely scholarship to boot.  I had been to Europe twice, coming up on my third trip, which was right after Graduation, and I was empowered.  It was a very rewarding experience that I think of fondly, and at the same time, I marvel at some of the antics we got in to.   I dissected a piglet, wrote stories, read plays, solved derivatives, sang songs in Spanish class, read aloud in French until we cried, and generally had a good time doing it.

Still as the year went on, the less than fine memories seem to pile up more than the best ones, though I’m sure they were equal.  As my last semester of high school started, my boyfriend started being repeatedly kicked out of his own home by his alcoholic parents and he usually came to my house.  Not that I begrudged him my happier home, but it was stressful and too difficult to maintain a relationship that way.  I began to fear my own codependency on him as he did with his parents, and I realized that our relationship was making me far unhappier than it was happy.  As a result, he and I lost a lot of trust that we had for one another, and in the end, called it off on Valentine’s Day.  I went stag to my senior prom, riding around in a Hummer packed full of my friends (all of whom had dates).  As luck would have it, he attended Hanover College the next fall as well, making it that much harder to forget and forgive.

Then, on May 1st, the unthinkable happened. I was at school on a Saturday, completing a semi-successful Economics project, when I happened to call my friend only to learn the terrible news: her older brother, a 21 year old student in pilot school, had died the previous night.  It was terrible and shocking, and my heart still hurts for that family.  I, along with my best friend, found myself rocketed into what is now a blur of late nights at Karli’s house.  For most of May, I think, her house was full of supportive friends all trying our bests to do whatever we could, from helping pick out cloths for the funeral to distracting from the sleepless nights.  I have never felt so helpless, but the love that I saw there, the heart-breaking, gut-wrenching love was incredible and unforgettable.

There are so many amazing people that made my senior year what it was, in both the good times and bad.  My best friend, Katelyn, showed incredible humanity.  She and I are a lot alike in many respects, but she is by far the more intimately caring person.  She has a lot of faith where I lacked it, and it showed.  And I had a mentor, a teacher who rose far above and beyond her realm of duty to listen to my ranting fears and doubts.  In fact, when I think of it now, it’s almost embarrassing to recall myself, hunched into one of the awkward arm desks, spilling the depths of my spinning mind to someone who was practically a stranger to me but who listened unwaveringly.  She is how I imagine all teachers and professors should be; she is steadfast in her classroom, both funny and serious, and she has the ability to see the things that happen outside of the classroom walls.

But soon all that would be left behind as my senior year drew to a close.

 

Chapter 1: Applications

Fall 2003

There are a whole plethora of things to say about your senior year of high school. After all, in all the movies, it’s your senior year that is conveniently the worse and the best, the hardest and the easiest, etc. Oh and don’t forget, that’s when you’re supposed to be falling in love with your unlikely sweetheart. But, if you’re a straight A student with all sights set on that glorious realm of post-secondary education, your senior year is consumed by one huge umbrella of applications.

You’ll have financial aid packets, health forms, loans, and the colleges themselves which will promptly follow the initial application pamphlet with even more health forms, financial aid packets, student life brochures, study abroad programs, housing forms, course selection lists and more. If you’re one of the lucky ones, you’ve already done your homework, so to speak. After months, maybe even years, of endless amounts of post cards and letters from colleges and universities around the country, you’ve managed to sift through all the gleaming pictures and alluring mottos and made you’re top ten list. If you’re not so lucky, you’re flying blind and all of those campuses are looking pretty much the same. I was somewhere closer to the second group, and even as midterms loomed during the fall semester of my senior year, I wasn’t all that proactive about my applications.

I knew without a doubt that I was going to college. That was the easy part, but unfortunately, my guidance counselors were only pointing me in vague and, honestly, confusing pathways. I did have a preemptive list of schools that I thought would be all right (and I used that exact terminology: “all right”). For starters, I was looking for a small-ish school, and I wanted nothing to do with classrooms that held hundreds of freshmen. Additionally, I had plans to study abroad. Those were my main criteria, and frankly, they weren’t helping me narrow the scope all that much.

So, I was considering applying to several schools. There was BU, which everyone had fabulous things to say about but no one really seemed to be able say much in terms of concrete information. Also, KZ whose study abroad programs looked nothing short of incredible, specialized, and perfect. And if you want to hear some more, there was MO, DP, FC, HC, and my catch-all IU (yes, I was aware that IU is enormous, but like I said, it was my catch-all, my shoe-in, my last resort).

Now, after you’ve narrowed down your list of schools (or perhaps not so narrowed it down), you’re theoretically ready to start compounding all the essential information you’ll need to actually complete the application process. I say process because don’t be fooled, you can’t just sit down one night after dinner and apply to the college of your choice. You’ll need a lot of basic information about your parents, which is fun, but luckily, if you’re a straight A student, you’re all set to go in terms of transcripts, SAT scores, and G.P.A. After you take care of the name, address, phone number, high school, and extra curricular parts of the application, you’ll probably have to face down the dreaded admissions essay. But for me, that’s not how it happened.

One day in November, I came home from school to find the typical stack of college “junk” mail waiting for me on the counter, but that day, there was special packet from HC (you’ll remember it from my list). Now, to make a long story short, all the things I heard about HC seemed fairly decent, and my boyfriend at the time was ranking it as his number one choice. So, when I realized that HC had sent me a so-called “Fast Track” application, I set it aside to consider it further. My mother had other plans, though, and that night, she dropped the application in my lap and said, “Do it.” Naturally, I filled out the application, which had its perks; most of the nonsense info about my address and such was already filled in, and there was no essay for me to sweat my way through. We mailed it back to the college by the end of the week.

I contented myself to tell everyone who asked, which seemed to pretty much everyone I knew, that I had applied to college (they didn’t need to know that it was only one college) and that hopefully I would hear back soon. In the meantime, I didn’t think all that much about applications after the one. Still, just a few weeks later, just before the start of Christmas vacation, I got an acceptance letter from HC in the mail. It was a nice moment, on the phone with my boyfriend who was also accepted that day and standing in the kitchen with my mom to open the financial aid letter that came with the acceptance letter. Imagine my surprise when I opened the envelope to a big, flashing $56,000 that I had apparently merited as an applicant. Ok, so it wasn’t really flashing, but it might as well have been.

So, standing in the middle of my kitchen, I knew immediately that my application process had gone from start to finish in a matter of weeks thanks to one application that took me all of twenty minutes to complete. I hadn’t visited the campus, and I hadn’t spoken to any professors, which probably sounds like a dumb move to all you up and coming college students. But, honestly, it didn’t matter at all to me. All that mattered was that in February, we had my federal and state financial aid statements, and thankfully, combined with my scholarship, my post-secondary education wasn’t going to cost me a penny. Well, in theory.