After a College Decision, a Fear of Getting It Wrong While everyone else was getting their acceptance letters, learning about their aid packages, and weighing their future college options, I spent the week doing something a little different: I visited Williams College, the school I'm committed to attend for the next four years, to try to get a taste of what my future is going to look like. The emotions leading up to my visit were pretty much what I expected: I was excited for the future, nervous about meeting all of my new classmates, and curious about how the campus would feel now that I knew I was attending. But there was also one feeling I didn't anticipate, something that totally changed my preview days experience: total, all-consuming fear. Now I'm not talking about a "fear" that people wouldn't like me, or a "fear" that I wouldn't have any fun. Sure, that was there, too, but it was less concerning. After all, everyone else had to be just as nervous as I was; everyone else was just as new as me. No, what I'm talking about, what worried me so much, was the sudden, overwhelming fear that I would reach campus and feel like I'd made the wrong decision. Like I'd feel like I made a mistake. You see, unlike most of the other prospective students at preview days, I wasn't visiting in order to comparative shop and get more information. I'd already made my decision; I already knew I was a member of the Williams College class of 2017. And so, if I didn't like the school, or the people, or the classes, the stakes were much higher for me than for anyone else. I was stuck, regardless of how my visit went. I think it goes without saying that I didn't get much sleep the night before the first day of visitation. And when I drove up to the drama center on Monday morning for my pre-frosh check-in, I couldn't have been more terrified. After a couple of conversations, classes, and a lunch with a current freshman, I started to settle in. In fact, by the time I met my student host that evening, I actually started feeling like I was at home. Needless to say, after I left Williams the next day, all my fears were alleviated: I loved the school, and I knew that the next four years were going to be some of the best of my life. But, more than that, I realized something about the college process itself, something I wouldn't have known or understood without making my final visit. That is, in the end, it's pretty much all random anyway. As much power as we'd like to think we have, ultimately, the most important parts of our life are going to be decided by chance. Let me explain: Next year I'm going to be a member of a freshman class of roughly 550 people. Of those people, the maybe 20 or 30 I become lifelong friends with aren't going to be selected from some bizarre application process; I'm not going to spend the next four years becoming close to the people who are the "most compatible" with my interests, personality or idiosyncrasies. Instead, my friends and my life are largely going to be determined by luck - which other freshman I'm randomly selected to live with, which classes I get admitted into, which dining hall I visit on some random Wednesday afternoon. And so, while we try to plan our lives out - while we look at hundreds of schools, and go on dozens of visits, and apply, and evaluate, and analyze - we can never really know what the future will be like. We can't control for chance. So yes, I won the lottery. I got into my first-choice college, and I know I'm going to love it. But I also know that it's not the only place I could be happy, that there are other Will Walkers, in alternate universes, that didn't get into Williams and whose lives will be just as fulfilling. Ultimately, I guess the biggest lesson I've learned from previews days - the biggest lesson I've learned from the college process in general - is that the cliché really is true: It's not which college you go to, it's what you do once you get there. I know I picked the right school (or one of the right schools) for me. Now it's just a matter of making sure I can make the best of it.