#aug2018

宇都宮「8010(パレット)」

上:なつおとめのフルーツサンド🍓

I am sitting in the study hall of my dorm as I am writing this. It’s a Thursday. It’s my first week in college and so far, things have been extremely tiring and challenging - challenging because I’ve only now just realized how suck-y my time management skills truly are, tiring because I can’t be bothered to take a jeep to my classes regardless of the distance from my dorm, which means that a huge chunk of my day is spent walking. The sudden jettisoning-out from my months-long state of lethargy is probably a factor contributing to my tiredness, too.

The title of this post is probably confusing you. Studying abroad?

Don’t get me wrong. I love my current university. I do. I truly do, with all my heart - just one week here and God, it feels so good to know that the next six years of my life will be spent in an institution I love and actually belong in. It’s a drastic change from my Catholic school upbringing, where students who are different are ostracized for not being the portrait of a good Catholic. Finally getting out of that feels incredibly good. No more getting sent to the head teacher over the most trivial of things. No more not being able to speak my thoughts online because, I quote, I’m “carrying the name of the school.” Like... what? Why does the school hold jurisdiction over my personal life and what I do when I’m out of the institution? I signed up for school, not for a convent.

Being in my current university is a big thing for me. It’s completely free, because we’re technically the country’s scholars, and the food is cheap, the air is fresh, and everyone is so, so nice. I’ve yet to meet a not-nice person. But—

The prospect of studying abroad never seems to be far away. In fact, it feels like it’s actually following me around. Before I left home for college, my brother told me, “You know, I never thought that you were gonna end up studying in UP.” When I asked him why, he said, “I don’t know, I thought you were going to study abroad or something.” Last Monday, while I was in-line to get my picture taken for my I.D., I saw a poster for an exchange program in Canada on one of the bulletin boards. Coincidentally, the partner university was one of the universities I had planned on applying to earlier this year. So, I spent the rest of the day with the thought of studying abroad just in the recesses of my mind.

It’s the small things. Even though I really am happy where I am now, I feel like a part of me will always long to know what possibly would have happened had I taken a gap year to apply to colleges abroad instead. Like, would I have been accepted? Rejected? The not-knowing sucks, and I hate it. Sometimes I hate myself too, for being so indecisive.

I realized a couple of weeks ago that I would have qualified for a scholarship in a university in New York had I just pushed through with applying to that university. I came as close to adding that university to the list of institutions I was applying to in CommonApp, but nothing beyond that. Honestly, I was scared that I was going to get rejected by every university in the States I was going to apply to and that fear kept me from actually asking my parents if I could take a gap year or maybe defer my enrollment to focus on college apps. That, and I was too late, anyways - I hadn’t taken the SATs yet and the applications deadline for almost every college was in January. (Most colleges require either your SAT or ACT scores.) I hadn’t written an essay yet, hadn’t passed my transcripts, hadn’t asked for letters of recommendation, et cetera.

If I had realized early on that I was actually eligible for a scholarship in the States, even if it was just a single university, I likely would have deferred my enrollment in UP, took the SATs, and applied abroad. Alas, I got my class ranking too late, and didn’t realize at the time that I could apply and (possibly) get accepted on a full-ride to that uni in New York. It sucks, I know. When I think about it, I feel like banging my head against a wall because of the stupidity of the entire situation.

In my defense, though, no one was exactly helping me with anything. My parents knew I wanted to apply but they were too busy and had zero knowledge with the application process. My friends hadn’t ever thought of applying abroad and so they had no idea how to go about applications as well. I basically had no one but myself, which meant that I had to figure out everything on my own. It was stressful, hard, discouraging.