Wooed by a Campus Visit, an Applicant Awaits Word From a 'Scholastic Suitor' If my college adventure was the "Wheel of Fortune," the National Merit board would be Pat, the University of Arizona, Arizona State University and the University of New Mexico would be the buzzer-clutching contestants, and the Fafsa folks would be Vanna, clad in a horrific $100-patterned empire waist gown with blinding orange accents. I'd be that rumored creature spinning the wheel from underneath, like the crusty old carny at the end of "Strangers on a Train." Who's the plaster Dalmatian? What are they trying to win? My (questionable) allegiance? The fruit of my sterling academic record? My soul, already mortgaged to the hilt? This is one of the most compelling questions in the college search. Why on earth do they want me, and - as I have (perhaps a mite too thoroughly, discussed in this space) - what am I sacrificing to be their anonymous, albeit, well-compensated, collegiate spokeswoman, a witness of their comings and goings in a digital badlands unmonitored enough to be a 21st century tombstone? More on my existential dilemma later. Fresh off my Fafsa nightmare, my mother and I made our way all five shy of 400 hundred miles down to Tucson to tour the University of Arizona and came a bit closer to making a decision about where I'm heading in the fall. This was my first trip to Tucson, a city as old as the country itself, and one where the best preserved historical landmarks aren't kitschy wedding chapels. It was extraordinary. This may be a bit of historical reverence verging on self-parody, but in Tucson I hit all the AAA guidebook highlights: breathing in the heady scent of history in the Hotel Congress lobby, humming along to Sam Cooke on the radio at Kon-Tiki, befriending a reservation dog sniffing around the parking lot outside the Mission San Xavier del Bac. Even now, bathed in the distinctly unromantic glow of a thousand stucco-studded southern Nevada strip malls, I still feel as though it's one of the most wonderful cities in the world. That sad golden afternoon light that every Southwesterner knows to be a mixed blessing imbues Tucson with a sweet vitality absent in Las Vegas, a city that bows beneath the weight of its own somber shadows until the next sundown. It's funny, here are two beacons in a dry desert, both isolated by several hours" drive through a dusty roadside scarred with abandoned amusement parks and wrecked-roofed trading posts, and they could not be more different. My fondness for the region was intensified by the trip across the Hoover Dam and down south. I do love this John Ford country, for all its faults. The campus is stunning and more than a match for the beauty of its surroundings. There's something to be said for a scene composed of sand, saguaro and rough red brick. I'm a strong believer in the impact of atmosphere on one's education, and clarity of purpose, paired with a lack of pretension, can facilitate learning where there might otherwise be a kind of mental opposition. The students seemed bright but casual; there wasn't the self-conscious intellectual vibe I encountered at other schools - not a single person mispronounced the name of their favorite Swedish auteur, which is certainly more than I can say for some schools I've encountered that wave the egghead flag. I haven't received my admissions decision yet, but it's looking sunny here in the heart of cactus country. So what am I getting at, exactly? As the Statlers and Waldorfs in the comment section like to say, grandstanding on this blog is pointless, and vague platitudes help no one. But it's difficult to be candid when so much is on the line, and the natural tendency is to hedge one's bets for fear of discouraging, shall we say, one's other scholastic suitors. So I'll proceed in "Wheel of Fortune" terms: the jackpot round is over, the University of Arizona is in the lead, and I still have no idea who the plaster Dalmatian is in this asinine metaphor. Ms. Childress, a student at Las Vegas Academy of International Studies, Performing and Visual Arts in Nevada, is one of eight high school seniors around the world blogging about their college searches for The Choice.