Last month, while driving back to New York with my mother after a trip to the Connecticut coastline, I had a rather uncomfortable encounter. While waiting in line for a cup of caramel swirl from Rich Farm Ice Cream in Oxford, a short woman wearing a shirt printed with images of animated Dachshunds struck up a conversation. The topic of where I attended college arose.

“My daughter got in there,” she said, with a bit of a snarl, speaking of NYU. “She went to Yale, instead.”

The woman (who is a college admissions officer at Yale and a Harvard graduate) felt NYU was unsafe due to its lack of an enclosed campus, and it is too high pressure.

“NYU has the highest suicide rate in the country,” she announced. "Only the Ivy League can open doors."

After sending out an annoyed tweet regarding her behavior, I decided to research her comments.

Using the criteria of cost, competitiveness, acceptance rate, crime on campus, and the engineering program, The Daily Beast rated Columbia the most stressful college in the country in 2010. NYU was 23rd.

This year, various news outlets reported higher than average suicide rates at MIT, Harvard, and Cornell. I found no article within the last five years mentioning NYU in terms of increased on-campus suicides. What I did find were many articles ranking NYU among the top schools for gaining connections, finding post-undergraduate employment, and sadly, high student debt.

Yes, perhaps NYU is intense, and I have yet to see any gates outside of a park, but, as NYU advertises, it is a school in and of the city. I feel the lifestyle it offers reflects an authentic New York experience, which in many cases may outweigh the tradition most associate with college campuses.

You feel pressure because you're living your life alongside people headed to the same jobs you wish to have. The location makes the daily norm consist of the magazine, Rolling Stone, photographing your dorm room because it was once the home of a famous hip-hop producer, editors of The New York Times taking the subway downtown for interviews, and even musicians giving you access to historic venues before their shows

These are actual examples of the things I experienced in my first semester at NYU. These experiences happened despite not being an Ivy League school nor being enclosed by gates.

To conclude, woman in the Dachshund shirt, I will give you that NYU and the city that never sleeps are tiring, but it’s good to be tired: it means you're working on accomplishing something.