Editor’s Epilogue: Congratulations on your Spring admission
It’s 11 p.m., Nov. 29, 2021. Puteaux, France — right on the west side of Paris, where the last stop on the metro lies. A girl is sitting in a 17th-floor apartment the size of a shoebox, registering for her spring classes at USC. The window is popped open, even though it’s 35 degrees outside, and some horrendous meal is cooking on a little electric stove. She doesn’t know yet that the time she’s spent here, about to come to a close, will change her life forever.
I’m a spring admit at USC, now a sophomore in my second semester on campus, an editor at the Daily Trojan and away from Paris, the place I had the privilege of studying abroad during my unique fall semester. As a Los Angeles County native, raised in a small beach city merely 45 minutes from this campus, my one goal when applying to college was pretty straightforward — leave California.
Some luck I have.
USC, prized for the public policy and journalism programs I inevitably became so passionate about, turned into a second home. As time passed, this University I was destined to attend has become a place that I find more and more perfect for the person I’m turning into — but only after I reckoned with the turmoil of being a spring admit to the Sol Price School of Public Policy. As a spring admit, I thought I would get left behind compared to the students who started in the fall; that maybe it would be harder to meet new people, join clubs, get housing or figure out how to tackle this new independent life with a whole host of eating restrictions that loomed darkly over me when I thought of eating at a dining hall.
Now, I’ve learned that my late start at the University was truly a lifeline.
Prior to the fall of 2021, I would’ve never considered myself a person who learns by doing or through experience. I am by nature a very stubborn person who has been told a multitude of times that I “think I have all the answers.” I’m unlearning that now, in more ways than one — or well, I’m trying to at least.
Had it not been for my fall Paris experience, and technically, a single admissions decision on my file, my entire outlook on life would be on a completely different plane.
I never would’ve fallen in love with my major quite the same way as I did when I took an efficient metro system to school, and saw the mental health benefits that came from living in a walkable, pedestrian-centered city like Paris — I worked hard to understand new local policies and saw the effect it had on my life in the four months I got to spend there.
Because I was a foreigner, plunged into a new environment where I truly wanted to fit myself into local life (and not stick out as French-despised American tourist), I now see the policies I study every day not just as laws meant to keep order, but rather — as corny as it sounds — the building blocks of a beautiful life. And the several spring-admitted classmates I’ve got? They bring me to Dauterive Hall every day with a smile.
Hell, had it not been for being a spring admit, I wouldn’t have experienced the beautiful challenge of living in a place where I didn’t speak the language and gained a very personal appreciation for those whose first language doesn’t come from where they now live — including my two parents, whose presence (and frequent requests for me to look over their work emails for English spelling mistakes) I learned to really miss while I was gone.
Even later on, had it not been for being a spring admit, I wouldn’t have been assigned with dozens of other spring admits to live in Troy Hall, where I made some of my best friends — one, who also did the Paris program, even became my significant other.
Had it not been for being a spring admit, I wouldn’t have come to terms nearly as quickly with a harsher reality — a rare eating disorder that, for my entire life, was mistaken as picky eating. Had it not been for me living alone in that tiny Paris apartment cooking everything I ate, I wouldn’t have sought out help as fast as I did or valued my physical well-being like I do now. I wouldn’t have started unlearning the guilt I felt about not eating “normally” the same way if I wasn’t 5,000 miles away from home, with only myself to hold me accountable.
Because of the uncertainty that many, including myself, felt when they saw an online, confetti-filled letter saying I had to start in January rather than August, I am a stronger woman from the path it led me down. A more independent human being. A kinder person, especially towards myself. A little wiser.
Funny how a single semester’s delay can cement so many things like that.
“Editors’ Epilogue” is a rotating column featuring a new Daily Trojan editor in each installment and their personal experiences of living in what seems to be an irrepressible dumpster fire of a world.