Most kids feel like they're attending the college they were meant to attend. Some just take a little longer to realize it than others.
Several years ago, I was invited back to my alma mater, UC-Irvine, as the keynote speaker at the freshman orientation program. In the audience were several hundred new freshmen and their parents. I wanted to grab their attention, so I decided to cut to the chase say,
“You know, I’ll bet a lot of you really wanted to go to UCLA.”
It got a good laugh, but a few months earlier when the rejection letters from UCLA arrived home, they probably wouldn't have found it that funny.
So I told them the truth. When I was eighteen, I sat in those very same seats and knew that I really wanted to be about 40 miles north in Westwood. So did a lot of my fellow freshmen. I told them that it had been that way at UCI for a long time and that, while every year, more and more freshman pick UCI as their first choice, an equal number really wanted to be Bruins.
Then I gave them the good news.
I told them that they just faced the largest and most competitive applicant pool in UCI’s history to get there and that they should feel proud to be sitting in that room. I reminded them that after one quarter on UCI’s campus, none of the freshmen would be talking about UCLA anymore. In fact, I made a promise that, at the end of the orientation weekend when they prepared to move into their new dorms, none of them were going to be thinking about UCLA anymore. Most kids end up at the right schools, and whether they knew it not, they were meant to be at UC-Irvine.
I told them that it was time for them to start making the most of the next four years, and that their college careers started "today."
Nearly five hundred new freshmen and their parents smiled collectively, let out a deep breath and applauded (which is admittedly great for a public speaker like me with an ego the size of a small planet).
There is no better feeling than seeing several hundred new college freshmen smiling, excited, and eager to embark on their four-year college adventure. And that same look will be on the faces of most of the college freshmen at over 2,500 colleges across the country this fall.
Kids, for the most part, like where they go to college. Sure, not everybody gets admitted to his first choice, but when you put a college freshman in a place with a bunch of fellow eighteen year-olds and tell him that all he has to do is learn and have fun for four years, it’s amazing how fast a kid forgets about whether or not he got into his first choice.
That’s just the way that college was meant to be.