Why did I apply to Hopkins? Because one day as the Early Decision II deadline approached two years ago, before I even had the language to describe what it feels like to take the first bite of a Uni Mini pepper steak at 3 a.m. after developing a correct theory of the world with my roommates for eight hours, I did some arithmetic: Hopkins had a department specifically for pure mathematics, and a whole conservatory. I wanted to study math and music on the side. Great!
But it wouldn’t be fair to describe the decision to apply to Hop as the answer to a set of correct and fairly obvious calculations, which I finally performed one afternoon. I didn’t suddenly grow up. On the contrary, I began the application process with a totally romantic and impractical view of college, and I ended it with a totally romantic and slightly practical view. I only partially figured out what I wanted—but somehow it worked out, and in the end, I ended up very happy with my choice.
Let me explain where I started. I first dreamed of college when I saw a picture of a school in Maine covered in snow. It looked peaceful, and also featured a mournful grove of dead trees, and that was enough to convince me that was the place. The feel was right, even though the feel was just the feel of buildings buried under a snowstorm, warm and closed off.
It was the comfort zone, and I loved it back then. My home is Western Massachusetts, a place that is also warm (inside, relative to outside) and closed off. In particular, what really makes West MA is the land: the oak-lined roads, the foliage, the low mountains, everything I would lose myself in as a kid. Yes, I had a certain smell-the-roses complex—and my whole college search ran through it, starting from the day I saw the snow and decided the school under it was my next love. You see what I mean about the romanticism?
Now I did realize pretty quickly that I needed, at least a little bit, to look into the facts. I wanted to do math. Well, the common data set exists. Ah: 3% of people at school X are math majors, for a total of 15 per class. Whoa! That’s kinda really small! This realization was the start of my broader college search. But of course, it really got going in earnest when I started to think in terms of the land again. If I went to “snow school,” the land might be warm, but what if I was bored? “Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown,” nope, not me, I was too smart. I was going to venture out and find my people over the hill. All of a sudden, I craved vibrancy and humanity and prestige. I was going to a city.
And that brings me to Hopkins. It had a great math program that differentiated between pure and applied majors, a conservatory (the first in the U.S.!) where I could take lessons, and it was in Baltimore. I had visited: the Inner Harbor was alive, and Hampden was cute, and it was all a world away from my piece of ground. It was a new land to get lost in. Perfect. So, you see I applied to Hopkins because of the facts—the math and the music—and because I was hopelessly obsessed with the idea of the city.
I had no clue how much or precisely why I’d end up loving it here. My reasons were all somewhat off—but I am so glad I applied. Well, actually, I was fully correct on one point: I thought the academics would be stellar. They are.
Hopkins has helped me grow as a mathematician, a musician, a writer, a human being—it has helped me grow in every way. To any applicants or admitted students: you can only know so much about who you’ll be in a few years. The admissions process is a guessing game about yourself. But Hopkins is a good bet to get lucky on.
