So I really wanted to go to Yale.

I’m not sure what it was, but Yale just sounded really cool and mysterious.

So I applied Early Action without giving it much thought.

I was counting down the days until finally,

My application status had an update.

My hands were shaking as I typed my password into the portal.

My heart was pounding.

My feet were sweating.

And with my eyes half closed,

I opened my status portal and…

When my cousin got into Yale

—

So Yale didn't go my way, and I didn’t really have a preference for other colleges.

So as many ambitious high schoolers do, I applied to most of the T15 schools, including a few closer to me in California.

After submitting your applications, there’s only so much you can do but wait.

And man, was the wait long.

But soon enough, I started hearing back.

One by one, acceptances and (a lot more) rejections started rolling in.

And I don’t mean to brag, but I even almost got recruited.

A different career path

Now after all my decisions came out, I narrowed my choices down to 4 schools: UCLA, UC Berkeley, Vanderbilt, and Cornell.

But UCLA seemed too close to home, and my brother was going to Berkeley so I wanted to try something new.

That narrowed it down to two.

But shoot.

How do I choose between the last two?

Well to start,

Vanderbilt sent me some merch.

Now it wasn’t really my “style”, but it was a nice gesture.

After some more intense thought and deliberation, and a lot of talking with my parents,

I still couldn’t make a decision.

So I listed out all the pros and cons I could think of, and as any trendy 18 year old would,

I took it to the internet.

I read online that Cornell can get pretty cold and depressing in the winter.

Not to mention the “seasonal depression” that supposedly made its way around the students there.

And I was already spooked by it all,

but some people just added unnecessary chills.

Now some people made reasonable points,

But they weren’t exactly what I was looking for when trying to choose a place to study at for the next four years.

And I swear I read online somewhere that Vandy had really low diversity.

Growing up around a lot of Asian Americans like myself, I wanted to find a similar community in college.

So I appreciated how some Redditors didn’t beat around the bush and got straight to the point.

But I guess I was still pretty dubious.

Because I followed up with another question.

Again,

Very straight to the point.

The last of my follow-up questions

—

So with all my new knowledge,

Now all that was left was to make a decision.

And I wish I could say there was some magic answer that came to me one morning when I woke up.

But like most decisions in life, it’s not so clear what’s “right.”

And no one knows what’s right because no one knows the future.

Both Cornell and Vandy presented really good opportunities for me.

I’d have the chance to move across the country, meet new people, study hard,

And I’d genuinely be happy to call myself a student at both places.

I remember I had a call with a “Big Red” Ambassador from Cornell during my decision-making process and he very matter-of-factly told me that he didn’t understand why I was being so indecisive because Cornell was obviously the better choice.

Which confused me,

Because the day before,

I had a call with a Vandy alumni who told me that Vandy was obviously the better choice.

The decisions we make can never be ideal.

Because the contexts we live in don’t give every decision an equal playing field.

Some have to weigh the cost of attendance more than others, while proximity to family might make the difference for others.

An uncountable set of factors (many outside our control) come together to define a unique environment in which we must take an action, without knowing what the reward will be.

For me, I boiled it down to the fundamentals.

What was worse to me than the fear that the other school might be “better” was being locked in a constant state of indecision, eating up my time and headspace.

At the time, I wanted to study math-adjacent things, and Cornell had a stronger curriculum in math and engineering.

Weather, location, familiarity mattered to me less.

And it’s hard to avoid the costs that you inevitably incur with the choices you make, but accepting that is part of the responsibility you take for the things you choose.

At a certain point, you just have to trust in your decision and move forward.

And in my experience, working through ambiguity always seems to open more doors than I could have ever anticipated.

So one morning in May, with only a little bit more confidence that this was the "better" decision,

I paid the deposit and accepted my spot at Cornell.

Summer passed by with a mixture of excitement and worry,

and before I knew it,

I was standing in the room I would call “home” for my very first year at an unfamiliar place called Cornell.¹

—

A year or two after I made the original Reddit post, someone commented on it to ask me where I ended up.

They asked me if I was happy with the choice that I had made.

So I thought about it for a few, brief seconds.

And this time,

With a lot more confidence,

I drafted up a response.