Oh god. Looking at my previous article is so embarrassing. Publishing my writing is so embarrassing. I can still empathize with Ryan-from-two-weeks-ago, but why was I so heated about listicles?

Oh — I’ve decided to try transferring. Today, I was going to flesh out why I have, but I know that that article would be much more comfortable to publish than what I’m about to. I’ll save “4 Reasons I’m Transferring Colleges” for a rainy day. For now, you get to see just these thoughts.

Ask any of my friends and they’ll tell you I’m overly romantic. I don’t think it’s a bad thing: romantic experiences make for good writing, and turning one of mine into letters was exactly what I did for a scholarship. The prompt asked me to “express my gratitude for Minds Matter” in some way. "Minds Matter" is an organization that provides free mentoring and tutoring for underprivileged, college-bound high schoolers.

Every "Minds Matter" mentee has to apply to five, and then attend one summer program of their choice, usually fully funded by Minds Matter. Being the idiot that I was, I didn’t apply to the requisite five, so "Minds Matter" withdrew funding from the summer program at Harvard I got into.

I was pissed. The seven-week program costs $11,500. My parents couldn’t reasonably afford that, so I turned to fundraising, raising around $6,500. Still, the people at "Minds Matter" discouraged me from going, arguing that there were cheaper programs out there that would be just as fulfilling. In hindsight, they were probably right, but I don’t regret my decision at all. Regardless, I won a little money from "Minds Matter" anyway. :)

Anyway, without further ado, here’s the essay I wrote back in October 2017:

The summer days I spent at Harvard’s Secondary School Program were the happiest of my life.

See, they were risky days, impudent, even: "Minds Matter" repeatedly advised me not to go, repeatedly warned “you’re making a huge mistake”—$5,000 of the program wasn’t covered—but you’ve surely also felt the exhilaration of doing what everyone said you shouldn’t.

I won’t lie: those days were so great because I fell in love. It was an urgent love, one that daily felt the palpably indifferent breath of the program’s end on its neck. But ephemerality precipitates the scenes of idyllic youth: 3 AM raids of Insomnia Cookies, naïve, starlit debates about Kantianism, melancholy conversations about us, after the fact. She’s at the University of Chicago now.

What existed for me beyond that love? My first taste of independence; a sense of awe for the University; undoubtedly, a sense of reassurance everyone around me cared—something I do not sense now.

I write this 441 days after the program’s end. Yet with each passing day, I futilely search harder for the same, enchanting blue eyes, worlds away, in the faces around me. Here, independence has long tasted stale; I force but harbor no awe.

And so I strive. If nothing else, all this has suffused me with ambition to transfer, with nostalgic purpose, with an unstoppable need to fulfill my wistfully romantic and intellectual needs. I am unwilling to settle; I can’t settle.

And so I am eternally grateful: to "Minds Matter", for bringing this program into my world; to the donors; to my self-sacrificing parents; and finally, to all who made those 49 days—and this word fails me—inimitable.

R.