studentsineurope

Rosaleen "sur la Seine"

I lay on my bed, facing the wall, sobbing silently as my mom knocked on the door. She knew I wasn’t sleeping and I knew I was being rude, but somehow I couldn’t face her pity. Furthermore, I knew it was pity I didn’t truly deserve. I had been accepted to UC Davis and USC offered me a place for the spring of 2008. At either of these two acclaimed universities I would surely receive a quality education.

But I’d worked so hard during high school dreaming of four years spent in the Northeast—Boston, New York, or the small private schools in little towns. These foreign, frosty cities held captive my Californian imagination, steeped as it was in the monotony of endless summers by the Pacific. I was truly lost in the mystique of the East and my Western backups, however good they might be, could never live up to my expectations.

It was March of 2007 and my senior class was receiving rejection letters daily. Girls would come to school in tears while boys stared sullenly out the windows. No one took notes during lectures.

I made a valiant effort to take solace in the fact that I was not alone. The fact was my entire class was facing the harshest year of university rejection in U.S. history and many of my classmates believed their futures to be as depressing as my own. Yet we could not quite ignore those unnerving smiles on the faces of the few, the elite—the Ones Who Got In. There was “Cornell, Class of 2011,” chattering happily to “Harvard Business School,” while “Notre Dame Full Scholarship” smugly counted off the quotas she would fill.

We were all at the same college preparatory school and we had all achieved so much. Yet so few of us were reaping the rewards. For days I lay inert on my bed, ignoring my mother’s persistent concern, before finally realizing the obvious truth: I was being a selfish brat. I could spend the rest of my life weighing the differences between my application and those of my classmates without ever feeling better. Or I could recognize the fact that I had gotten into USC, one of the top thirty schools in America. Sure it wasn’t first semester and no it wasn’t in New York—but it was still USC, and still a far better education than most people would ever have the opportunity to accept.

My bitterness didn’t vanish overnight and I didn’t expect it to. After all, I was field hockey league MVP and I did take nine AP classes, which at the time seemed to be of incalculable importance. But what I did do was replace my self-pity with a new idea that led me from inertia to action: I had an extra six months to fill and I didn’t want to spend them at community college. Why not Paris?

The idea came to me in a wave of excitement and disbelief. How had I possibly not thought of this before? I had been studying French for years and although I had been to Europe before I had never seen France or had the opportunity to truly speak the language. I hadn’t yet decided on a major, so a few months spent improving my French and learning about the world seemed the perfect way to broaden my horizons. I wanted excitement, romance, croissants—all things I wouldn’t find sitting locked in my room at home.

It wasn’t the normal choice but it was infinitely better than months of boredom and disappointment stalking Facebook while my friends posted pictures of their first semester adventures. I jumped out of bed and onto my computer, determined to spend some quality time on Google.

It was already March. I was only eighteen. I wasn’t enrolled anywhere. I knew my options were limited but I was filled with the type of determination that can only spring from absolute apathy. Within hours I was printing out paperwork on different potential study abroad programs. My local community college offered a trip, which meant applying to the school and then the study abroad—I vetoed that option pretty quickly. Then there was AFS and an assortment of other companies that offered programs in France, but those deadlines had already passed.

Finally I chanced upon Abroadco, a small, little-known company that offered three months in Paris at the Sorbonne University. Within hours my application was in the mail and I was once again feeling the nervous excitement of possibility.

And then, a few weeks later, I found myself enlisted in the ranks of those few, the elite—The Ones Who Got In. It wasn’t the East and it wasn’t what most people expected, but I couldn’t help a little grin of satisfaction when “Columbia Legacy Connection” heard of my acceptance and congratulated me with just the smallest hint of jealousy.

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Read More About Rosaleen’s Parisian Experiences
in the Study Abroad section of StudentStuff.com.