get into columbia or nyu

I just put my application in on Sunday! I’ll find out mid-December if I’ve made it! I’ve wanted this for so long.

Like Mary Hawkins, I saw this up on Zeitgeist, and thought, “yeah, I did that”.

I got into Barnard, the women’s college of Columbia, first, when I was looking at undergrad. I ended up at Occidental College, in L.A., instead. I wanted the heck out of the suburbs, so I only applied to schools in big cities.

After Oxy, I was wait-listed for Columbia Law School, when I had the wild hair to go to law school. My grandmother had given me some money for graduation, and I put it into taking the LSATs. Then I got a really good score on the LSATs, so I thought, oh what the heck, I’ll apply to law schools. One of my best decisions I ever made was not to go. So I never had to worry about being wait-listed for Columbia—I wrote them a letter and told them I wasn’t coming.

Then, later in life, after I got a Lehman fellowship, I applied and got into NYU for a master’s degree in public administration. Cornell, though, gave me a grant on top of my fellowship, so I went there instead for a planning degree. And survival on a tiny fellowship looked a lot easier in Ithaca than in NYC, so Cornell won out. The NYU program would have been much more helpful in terms of my later career. But Cornell was socially a good time for me, and spending a couple of years in Ithaca was much more laid-back than spending them in NYC.

So yeah, I got in twice, and I might have gotten in eventually if I had been willing to wait when wait-listed, but I never took advantage of these opportunities. In retrospect, it was just as well. It was better that I went to Oxy, Cornell, and didn’t go to law school.

I got into both, actually..

Eh, the decisions only begin with admission.