Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

When I was looking at transfer colleges, Swarthmore topped the list, followed by Bryn Mawr and then Haverford. Swarthmore has a really nice campus and an Aikido club, and it’s terribly easy to travel between the college and my house; not to mention that it’s one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. But Swarthmore is impossibly hard to get into, so I pretty much counted on a rejection from them.

Bryn Mawr was the only college for which I had a tour and an interview over spring break, and I really loved the college after that. (One of the reasons I didn’t want a tour of Swarthmore after the Bryn Mawr tour was because I didn’t want to fall more in love with the school least likely to accept me.) Bryn Mawr is really neat: we get lanterns in our class color (red for 2009); the whole campus looks like a castle; and there’s a May Day celebration and a cloister with a fountain and a tradition—established by Katherine Hepburn—of skinny dipping. On top of that, most of the dorms are singles and a lot of them have fireplaces and window seats. So I got myself pretty excited to go to Bryn Mawr; my application for this college was best, too, because I wrote it over spring break and not from New York two nights before it was due.

As I’ve already mentioned, I’d been checking the mail every day waiting to hear from the colleges. Bryn Mawr was to mail on the 15th, and Swarthmore said they would notify by the 15th, so I figured I would hear from both colleges by this coming Wednesday. Yesterday Ricky and I were playing ddr when the phone rang and my mother called me to get it. Thinking it was a friend who wouldn’t mind waiting a moment for me to finish a song, I kept playing. But my mother gestured that it was important, so I got off the dance mat and on the phone with the woman in charge of transfer admissions who had interviewed me at Bryn Mawr. She called to say, first of all, that congratulations, I was accepted (yay!); and second, that they were having technical problems with the letters and would be sending them out Monday or Tuesday at the latest with the financial aid information. So I’m going to college!!! It’s such a cute little school that the admissions people call students to congratulate them. That would have taken weeks at NYU.

Today while I was out, a letter came from Swarthmore. My stepfather told my mother that it wasn’t a small letter (rejection), but it wasn’t a large letter (admission) either; it was kind of in-between. So my mother told him to open it (without my permission—isn’t that breaking some federal law?), and it was indeed neither a rejection nor a letter of acceptance. I got wait-listed. But isn’t that so awesome? Swarthmore College says I’m qualified, and the person who wrote the letter (who actually bothered to use my nickname in the address) seemed genuinely sorry that there weren’t enough spaces right now. The letter-writer even hoped that I had other options to pursue. Nearly 5000 kids applied for freshman class, and nearly 200 were trying to get in as transfers, so I understand that I didn’t get one of the coveted positions; I’m just amazed that they didn’t actually reject me.

So it looks like I’m going to Bryn Mawr. Or, at least, I’d better be after I dragged my mother and Stephen and Dave all around the campus in the lovely rainy weather today to look at the school and buy lots of shirts and pens and mugs, etc. in the bookstore. Luckily, the shop was open, and we were even able to get inside the buildings. It’s possibly because today was graduation (I swear I thought the website said it was the 20th). I think I’m still going to keep my name on the list for Swarthmore, though. They may just want to give me a free ride after wait-listing me, and I don’t know if I could really pass that up. I haven’t actually heard about money from Bryn Mawr yet, and I haven’t heard anything from Haverford, but they’d have to give me a lot of money for me to choose them over Bryn Mawr. The thing is, though, if I go to Bryn Mawr I can do all the cool traditions that they have and still take part in Swarthmore’s Aikido club and enjoy their campus (as well as my own). If I went to either of the other schools, I wouldn’t get to live in a castle or dress up in white and dance around May poles or any of the cool things that Bryn Mawr kids do.

Mood: V. happy

Edit: Amusingly enough, Haverford rejected my application for admission. It’s okay; I didn’t really want to go there anyway. They sent out an email on Tuesday, and I thought maybe they were emailing rejections rather than wasting the paper to send out all of the bad news letters. Apparently, though, they were just emailing as a rough draft; a physical letter came with the mail on Wednesday, along with my acceptance package from Bryn Mawr (complete with temporary tattoo). It’s still very funny that Swarthmore would accept me if they had room while the so-thought safety school would not. The only problem is that if I want to learn Japanese, I’ll have to take courses at Haverford.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 5:30pm and is filed under Personal, College. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.