Like many high school seniors, college application season drove me to the brink of insanity. I have a vivid imagination, so every time I toured a different campus, I’d begin to envision my fantasy four years there: I saw myself in different clubs, I saw myself with friends on the quad, I saw myself eating in dining halls… in retrospect, I suppose it’s a good thing that I was excited about schools, but being excited about eight different schools all at once can be overwhelming in its own way.

My worry soon shifted from ‘Will I find somewhere I like’ to ‘How am I going to choose’ – I loved them all so much. In order to get a sense for my home for the next four years, I decided to visit friends that I had on different campuses.

I spent the summer before my senior year doing a program at which I made some friends that would be starting their first year at Northwestern, so I decided to visit them come October 2012. Not going to lie – I was pretty nervous. I had absolutely no idea what the one-night visit would entail. I have an aunt who lives in the area, so at around 5 p.m. on a Friday evening, we left her house and made our way to the Evanston campus.

We pulled up to the arch around 5:30, and there waiting for me were Elizabeth and Caitlin, the two friends I’d made the past summer. I had resigned myself to their care for the evening, and the first thing they did was take me to Allison Dining Hall. Little did I know as I indulged in my first hot cookie bar that this would be the first of many to come.

That evening, as my hosts’ friends walked by dinner and saw that there was a perspective student, they would stop by and talk to me, asking me about myself in addition to telling me why they loved Northwestern. They made me feel so unbelievably welcome, and I had no idea at the time how indicative of the warmth and kindness inherent to the Wildcat community that was.

After a few hours of chatting and walking around campus, my friends ended the night by taking me to see what would be my first Northwestern theatre experience. I saw a showing of “The Derby County Derby,” an original comedy written by Northwestern undergraduate students and put on by Vertigo, one of Northwestern’s theatre organizations. I’ve never laughed so hard in my entire life. I must have seen what is still one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen, and it came when I least expected it. That show was not only hysterical but also produced and created entirely by students, making me yearn to be a part of that community and be able to contribute to the supportive and vibrant theatre scene on campus.

I’m sure I would have had fun experiences no matter what campus I visited. But at the end of the day, having current students take an interest in me, even when I wasn’t a Wildcat, made me feel so attached to the community here. For the first time, I was meeting those that would come to be some of my best friends.

I looked at a lot of schools besides Northwestern. But at the end of the day, the passion on this campus was like a magnet, and it just drew me in.