I guess I should start on how I even ended up in this situation. After all, it’s pretty unconventional to be spending your freshman year abroad, even more so if you weren't expecting it.
Around November I started applying to basically every school possible. This was mostly fueled by my early rejection from Yale (still slightly bitter), and a growing sense of panic that no school was going to take me (in retrospect, yeah I’m foolish). In total I applied to seventeen colleges (I know, I know), was accepted by five, wait listed by four (so close!), and rejected by all the rest (these were mostly Ivies mind you).
Of the colleges that accepted me, UCLA and NYU were really the only two I was deciding between. At NYU, I applied for the College of Arts and Science (you know the regular college), but NYU sent me an e-mail about a week before they sent an official acceptance letter saying that I’ve been placed in their Liberal Studies Program, and I had a week to decide where I wanted to spend my freshman year in either New York, London, Paris, Florence, or Shanghai
Panic! Panic! Panic!
When I was applying to NYU there was a little boxed that I checked that basically said I was okay if NYU put me in a program other than the one I originally applied for. Who really thinks they’ll end up in a foreign country when they check that?
Well, first thing was to tell me parents what I had gotten myself into. Mind you neither of my parents went to college, and I’m the oldest in my family so this whole experience was already confusing enough for them. When I told them I had a week (a week! what is this?) to choose where my freshman year will be spent they obviously wanted Shanghai so I could connect back to my roots. I had to gently say no. I’m not ashamed of my culture, but in China I would blend in, and honestly be too close to home. (I had secretly decided that if I was going to go abroad I was going to go all out) So the choices that were left were New York, London, Paris, and Florence. In this program I was going to spend the next three years in New York regardless. New York was out. People speak English in London. Out. So Paris or Florence. On a whim I decided Paris was where I going to spend my freshman year. I logged on to my NYU account and checked the little box next to Paris and hit submit.
A week later my official acceptance letter was sent explaining what the program actually was. At this point I still was deciding between UCLA and NYU-Paris. I had done some research on both schools. They tend to attract the same students, for the same price (okay, living in France is a bit more expensive), but they could not be more different campus wise. UCLA was a typical college experience, football games, an actual campus, and a big student body. NYU-Paris (and NYU in general) was far from a typical college experience, no big team sports (how could you with only seventy people in the whole program?), a forty-five minute commute on the metro just to get to class, and classes being taught and a converted mansion (I’m actually not sure about this last bit, but the pictures on-line lead me to believe this) not to mention that regular NYU also has no football team, and the frats and sororities are only a hallway in an apartment building.
I could not have asked for two more different options for both my freshman year and further down. I would have liked to have visited both. But between my parent’s work schedule and the fact that every single college has it’s admitted student’s day on the same weekend (I see what they’re trying to do) meant I had to choose one. On a whim (much like the one that possessed me to choose Paris) I choose to visit NYU got brainwashed into loving it. Okay and maybe actually loving it too.
