how and why I chose to attend Olin College

Well, I know it isn't ideal to look back a year later at something and expect to remember everything as well as one would like to, but I'll give it a shot anyways. As you might expect if you've seen my writing before, I won't actually start at the beginning, which would make sense. Instead, you get to piece the story together as I see it in my head, which may mean jumping around in time on occasion. Enjoy.

From the instant I stepped on Olin's campus and talked to students, I knew deep down that I had found a home away from home, though in reality I was months away from knowing for sure that I would be coming to Olin in the fall. "Candidates Weekend", the first time I was on Olin's campus, is one of the more vivid memories I have had to date. I remember Marbrisas, and I remember asking Ato "Donde estan las donas?" I remember the soccer game when I broke my ankle sophomore year... I remember singing "...caminando por la calle yo te vi..," i remember playing hockey and our games, I remember learning how to mishandle a computer by banging on the keys of Nene's computer. :) (sorry!) I remember going to Guadalajara when I was eight well enough that the last time I was there this past summer I felt like I'd time traveled 10 years. The memory of Candidates Weekend is as vivid as any of these to the extent that I distinctly remember talking to dozens of Olin students, from those who would come to join me at Olin to others that would graduate before I ever returned to campus.

I've told a few people this before, but now I'll tell everyone. In all of my life, the two single best choices I have made have been the following.

1. Attending Saint Augustine. Now I know that the only reason I attended Saints is because of the fact that I have parents willing enough to sacrifice above an beyond what I can put to words, but nonetheless few times have I ever been so sure of something as I was when I told my parents I wanted to go to Saints.
   
2. The second of these two is my decision to attend Olin. The odds were heavily against Olin from the start, but it was most definitely the right decision.
   

Sure it was free, but to be honest, money wasn't an issue for any school I applied to. In fact, I think Olin is more expensive than any other school I could have attended. My college application process was very strange and in the end, extremely rewarding. The reason why it started "strangely" has to do with the fact that I knew nothing about college, other than what little I remembered hearing from Iliana and Erik about Davis. All I knew about college was that it was where Ato & Nene disappeared to for a while, and USD was a college that people occasionally got married at ;) In any case, when I started making my list of colleges sophomore year, my criteria were the following:

• number of engineering majors from the university,
  
• proximity to the city, where closer was many times better than further away
  
• being far away from home, where the safety net of family, good weather and high school friends would do little to help me become independent and "grow up."
  
• oh yeah, and by this time I'd finished doing the Preliminary SAT test, so I chose schools who's SAT range was approximately mine, scaled up a bit.
  

Well, the interesting thing about the list that came out of those four criteria is that without meaning to, in my list of 9 schools I had 6 of the 11 hardest schools to get into (at the time). Oops! What did I know about colleges? I didn't know what schools were actually "Ivy Leaque." My list, which initially consisted of: Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Wash. U in St. Louis, among others, would eventually grow to include schools that my counselor knew I could get into, like WPI and University of Miami. In any case, the reason why my college application process turned out to be "rewarding" and pleasant was the fact that despite assuming I'd see more rejection letters than anybody else at my high school, I didn't receive a single one! :D

Still, Olin wasn't high on that list. It was actually only added it because my counselor really liked Olin, even though it wasn't in the city, & it was tiny, which is not what I originally wanted at all, I included it in my list.

Flash forward to Candidates Weekend again. By this point I've looked at Olin a bit. I'm intrigued, and I can't help but think that the teamwork/project oriented learning at Olin might just put it on the radar of top college prospects. As I boarded the plane to leave for Olin, I couldn't help but think that I would be at Columbia come the fall. It was perfect! In the city, NYC in fact! It was large, it had engineering, and there campus was nice I suppose. After 3 hours on campus, before Candidates Weekend had even started, I knew that Olin meant business. In the first 3 hours I was given a tour of the robotics lab at Olin, full of robotic snakes, robotic legs, games and doodads, and on top of that, the sophomores I was talking to were actually working on them! I also got a chance to meet about a dozen of the craziest people I've ever met.

There are 300 crazy people at Olin. Every single one of them. There were students who engineered a hammock in their room without screwing anything into the wall, other students that were randomly unicycling up the stairs, another doing crazy acrobatic handstands in the middle of the quad (called the Oval) and others that did similar crazy things, but nothing stood out as much as the atmosphere of community and openness that knocked me out every time I talked to another student on campus.

After a weekend around some of the most interesting people I'd ever met in my life, I knew Olin was for me. Fast forward to when I found out I got into Olin. I never have told anyone this, but I actually sent in my enrollment form for Olin around April 12th (about two weeks after finding out I got in). In any case, Ma told me several times that I should really take my time, and that I should make sure that Olin really was for me every time I commented on how I thought Olin was it. There was just something Olin had that I didn't find anywhere else in the schools I visited. I sent in the form, and didn't tell anyone that I did, knowing that even If I had to take out loans for the entirety of what it would cost to attend Olin, that I would be flying out to Needham, MA in late August. Sure enough, I did, and here I am.

That's all for now. Next time I can write about my first semester at Olin!