When you apply to big, “brand-name” universities, everyone’s expectations of you go through the roof. Suddenly, everyone has an opinion about your future. Adults are pushing their alma maters or lamenting the schools where they wish they could have gone. Everyone is excited.

Unfortunately, they’re not so excited when you decide to go to a school that they’ve never heard of. Carlow is great...but it sure isn’t The University of Pittsburgh. Suddenly the questions are focused on the size and location of the school, whether boys actually attend there and why someone who could’ve gone somewhere bigger would choose it.

They go from telling me to shoot for the stars to telling me I settled for less. That’s where they are wrong. I didn’t settle, and they need to stop telling me I did.

I could have loved my time at Pitt, Duquesne or any of the other universities I got into, but it would have never been home. Carlow is home. I get that not everyone knows where it is. People confuse us with Chatham all the time. They assume they know anything about us, but, if they did, they wouldn’t have any questions about why I chose it.

I was always told that going to a bigger university would mean that I would get to meet more people. Well, sorry to tell you all, but that’s not always true. Sure, you’re sitting in a classroom with a couple hundred people, but how many of them do you actually talk to? The two people who sat next to you? Can you even recognize people from your class on your campus?

Carlow is small, and you don’t quite realize how small it is until you actually come here. The biggest class I’ve been in had about 25 people in it. That’s it. This automatically means that you know every single person and where their unassigned seat is. Your professors call you by your name. When I see people from my classes out in Oakland or on campus, I know who they are. Our conversations can last beyond talking about how hard our recent test was.

“Oh, but bigger universities have so many more activities that you can join!” Okay, that’s great! But Carlow has most of them, too, and I don’t have to fight for opportunities to succeed with 50 other people. And when Carlow doesn’t have an activity that its students want to join, they have this amazing chance to start it from the ground up with a faculty member and watch it do well. Our faculty want to see us do fantastic things and live meaningful lives.

There are dozens of reasons that I should have gone to a school like Pitt. I’ve heard them all. And while Pitt is a great school and I wish its students nothing but the best, it doesn’t have anything that Carlow couldn’t give me.

Somewhere along the way, people invented this idea that going to a smaller, lesser-known school meant that you either A, settled for it or B, didn’t get into the school you actually wanted to go to. It’s like people are confounded by the fact that I actually wanted to go to Carlow.

I’m here to tell you that I definitely didn’t settle for Carlow. I love everything about it. I’ve made amazing friends, involved myself in a ton of extracurriculars and I’ve built relationships with my teachers. Carlow taught me that nothing is settling if it’s what you actually want.

I didn’t settle for Carlow, so please stop telling me that I did.