As second round pre-frosh, putting Princeton in its place

This past week, I became a pre-frosh. I visited colleges, feasted at their dining halls, attended lectures and spoke to their students. The only thing I didn't do was schedule an interview with an admissions officer.

This was not intentional by any means. It began just as a visit to see friends in Boston. I had a simple itinerary planned out where I would somehow arrive at Boston all ready for a weekend of fun. Unfortunately, the Fung Wah Bus' advertised four and a half hour long trip from New York City to Boston became a grueling six hour bus ride instead. Once off the bus, I blindly followed my instincts to the nearest T-stop and arrived, tired and haggard, at Harvard.

I have not yet heard of a pre-frosh so diehard that he/she is willing to spend nine hours traveling to some college. Only good friends and family do that.

Nonetheless, pre-frosh instincts slowly but surely crept onto me as the days past, starting with mundane observations and polite questions about the housing system, classes and building architecture. I walked through Harvard Yard, admiring the quaint and cute freshman dormitories, such as Wigglesworth. I discovered that Eliot House serves twelve varieties of cereal, including Crispex and Golden Grahams, personal favorites of mine. I even sat down to eat no less than two bowls of cereal every meal to prove to myself that I could feasibly survive on Harvard food if need be.

I did not emerge from my Princeton undergrad cocoon as a fully developed pre-frosh until I landed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology though. As my friend led me around the various residence halls, one by one her friends asked me, "So where are you from?"

I'd politely respond, "Princeton," and then wait for comprehension to dawn upon their faces.

Comprehension came but not in the form I expected. I had assumed that people would automatically associate with me Princeton University once I said the name but instead, they said, "Oh, you're a pre-frosh from Princeton. How do you like MIT so far?"

I sat in stunned silence the first time it happened, but later I corrected them right away and waited for a more impressive reaction. It never came. People simply continued the conversation by asking about friends they had at Princeton and how I liked the school, or by even ignoring the fact and choosing a different topic of conversation. Not a single one of them mouthed amazement and said, "That's where I wanted to go but . . . "

Of course, I never expected that to happen, but for some reason, I wanted it to. I wanted someone to validate my decision to attend Princeton because I had truly agonized over my "college decision" and did not mail in those decision postcards until 5 p.m. the day they were due. I wanted someone to come up to me and say, "You made the right decision in coming to Princeton. Good thing you're not here; otherwise you would have definitely regretted it."

But during my five days as a pre-frosh, I realized that would never happen because those kinds of people are very rare and kept far away from pre-frosh. Most people like where they are, and if they don't, they usually just stick it out until they do. Moreover, when you strip all the colleges of their pretentiousness and propaganda, they're all pretty much the same. They all have intelligent professors, small classes supplementing two hundred persons lectures and graduate students who live in a nearly separate world filled with some sort of intense research unbeknownst to the rest of us. Each residential college/house/hall has its own personality, and there is always the "ugly" one that serves as the campus eyesore.

At the end of my college trip, I realized that what people have been telling me all along is true. It really doesn't matter where you go for your undergraduate degree; it matters what you make of it.

So for the next four years of my life, I expect that I'll be heavily sleep deprived and overly stressed at Princeton. I'll complain about the weather, the food, and how the only thing I do well in classes is help others get nice grades with the curve. But I strongly suspect that even if I weren't at Princeton, I'd be doing the same thing elsewhere.

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Don't get me wrong. By no means is Princeton bad or even mediocre. In fact, with or without the U.S. News and World Report's rankings, it's a fairly decent school. It's just not the "be all, end all." No school ever can be.

Anna Huang is a freshman from Westlake, Ohio.