The Happiness Question
February is that month: some stray applications may still be due, but which is otherwise smack in the middle of the long waiting period to hear back from schools. This is great, since you no longer have to write a flurry of essays, but it can also have its downside — it was around this time a few years ago that many of friends started to question the most basic of their decisions: the very schools to which they applied.
The most common question I heard was, “will I be happy at [insert school name here]?”
It became common enough that I stopped questioning the logic behind it, and even found myself wondering the same thing about Harvard. Was it too close to home? Would I be overwhelmed by being a small fish in a large pond? (Many people seriously asked me that to my face, as though that question isn’t really a disguised version of “are you going to be okay knowing that you’ll be basically irrelevant compared to thousands of other smart, talented people?”)
All these doubts have the potential to be beneficial — if you can view them with enough detachment — but as any high school senior knows, overthinking is bound to kick in. Which is why “will I be happy here?” is a circular question with no possibility for resolution until you actually matriculate, register, and arrive on campus in the fall to actually see what that school is like.
Let me clarify, of course, that this question makes a lot of sense if you’re considering applying to a school in a suburb or a rural area, but can’t imagine leaving behind the steady chorus of car horns that are a staple of city living.
I mean, you could end up liking the silence, but part of the college process is doing due diligence and asking yourself whether what a school has to offer, as part of its most basic characteristics, is something that you could at best put up with or at worst, come to detest and resent.
(One trait like this, beyond the obvious matter of physical location, is the calendar system. Don’t do what I did and apply to a school that has a quarter system and schedules fall final exams after winter break. Yes, this is real, and no, I did not do enough research when applying. I luckily dodged a bullet, but if the quarter system is something that doesn’t sit well with you for some reason, then look elsewhere. Unless you dislike semesters, in which case, by all means seek out these schools! Some notable ones that come to mind are Dartmouth, the University of Chicago, and Stanford, although there are plenty of others.)
I do want to address the happiness question because it seems to be one that students ask themselves without making the distinction between aspects of a school that could actively make them unhappy (location being one of them, as well as difficulty transferring between majors, types of living options, cost, etc) and those that, while seemingly important, don’t actually make as much difference as you think they will.
I’ve written about this briefly in a previous article, but I wanted to expand on this a little more because of the ubiquity of this question. It’s very easy to equate not matriculating at your top choice school with a possible four years of misery, but this just simply isn’t the case.
Much of your college experience is heavily dependent on what you choose to do to fill those four years; if you hate biology, the odds are good that even if you do that are your dream school, you will still be much more miserable than if you had chosen to study film — your true passion — at a school you were not as excited about initially.
Not participating in campus life anywhere will probably make you more unhappy than if you try a few things that seem tangential to your interests.
It’s important to remember that even if it feels like you have no control over the college admissions process — a feeling to which I’m sure many of us can relate — you have much more say in how you spend your college years.
That’s where the happiness comes from: from the ability to play a club sport, take up painting, secure an internship, take interesting classes on weird topics you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of, and to meet people that could end up being your closest friends.
The happiness question is a flawed one because it assumes you don’t have some or any control over what happens to you in college, and that simply isn’t true.
Of course, every school has its quirks, and some of them will continue to annoy you even once you’re a veteran and have gotten the feel for how college works. But those small annoyances can’t, and shouldn’t, get in the way of so-called happiness: they’re bugs in the system, and life has them too. If you’ve done your research and eliminated the obvious things that you know would limit your or stifle you in college, the unknown variables should work themselves out. (Fear of the unknown is another source of the happiness question, which preys on the idea that if you don’t know how college will play out, it might not bring you the experience you’ve hoped for.)
That’s the beauty of college: you get to choose why, how, with whom you spend your time — which is how you create the building blocks of happiness in the first place.
