The Final Seconds

Wow. The last day has been hard. The last week has been hard, but yesterday might have been one of the most stressful days of my life. I'm talking about truly profound stress, the kind that reached deep inside you and twists something and you don't feel right for a long time after. Yesterday afternoon I had a call from an admissions official at Brandeis University, one of the institutions that I applied to in the spring. In March I found that I had been placed on the waiting list. I resigned myself to the fact that I would not make it into such a prestigious institution (don't feel bad if you've never heard of it, apparently no one has, but I encourage you to research it, it's actually quite a great school, with conspicuously high rankings among other competitive schools in the Boston area). Well, this guy named David calls up and informs me that I've been admitted to the class of 2012. The entire conversation felt slightly surreal. I had resigned myself to a future at my state's respectable university, an experience that, while I thought might prove itself to be surprisingly fulfilling. Now, in the final seconds of the game I've been told that there is another choice. An entirely new option. I got very excited.

They offered me $28,000 in aid. Seconds ago, I got off the phone, having left an extremely bewildered message on David's voice mail detailing why I could not attend Brandeis in the fall. The long and the short of it (as I frantically attempt to explain it to myself right now) is that, despite the copious amount of money they were prepared to offer me, at the end of my four years there, I would still graduate with close to $40,000 in debt. This, while perhaps negligible compared to some people's debt, was too much for me, especially when held in comparison to the parsley $14,000 in debt I would incur at my state school.

So I turned them down. My dream school, the school that had the potential to open for me doors to places I had never before imagined, lucrative careers, and a nurturing profoundly ingenious teaching rationale that encouraged introspection and understanding; tolerance over ignorance, with an emphasis on knowledge as the key to success. I place that, I feel, I would have fit right in.

But in the end, I have to think realistically. And the reality is that at this state school I would still relieve a stellar education at quite a reduced price. And right now, that's something I can't say no to.

Isn't it funny how supposedly win/win situations suddenly become lose/lose? I suppose we'll see how this all plays out.