My deranged journey towards college pt.1
By: Alessio Fino
Tags: University, Study, College Application, Travel, College

Sharing with you my experience while I try to find my way towards a college experience I would enjoy, collecting any tips I can find along the way for all my readers.

A couple of years ago, I was in geography class, probably it was one of the few times I was actually paying attention to the lesson, and I remember my teacher was talking about rivers. At some point he named the deranged river pattern; the word deranged was so appealing to me. It describes a drainage system with no coherent pattern, so there is no logical way to define where the river is heading to, and which direction it will take, I found it to be the perfect description of my journey towards college.

A small introduction about me: My name is Alessio, my dream is to become a great engineer and to lead the way towards a new space race that would lead mankind to explore the solar system and beyond. Paving the way for new astronauts to succeed in their endeavor to discover more about our universe.

My first goal was the one to set priorities: How do I want my life in college to look like?

I decided that my priority is to have an enjoyable college experience, one that allows me to live college life at its best; to me, this means having the possibility to join clubs that work on research projects, which are often opened to undergrads as well, and to be able to meet new people to share my college life with. I’m not aiming for the top-of-the-list universities, I’m aiming for a reasonably-high-level university that responds to my requirements.

The reason why I put the enjoyability of my life in college as a top priority is that if this requirement is not met, my levels of stress would spike and I would underperform severely, I noticed this so many times, I struggle so much to work a lot on what I don’t like. I imagine myself attending a university abroad (yes, I love traveling, I’ll come back to it in a second), the workload is high but still reasonable, so that I have enough free time to explore the new country and to dive into new opportunities. Picturing all of this in my head brings me to the peak of excitement, and I really want to make it a reality.

You may find my choice of focusing on college life instead of job opportunities odd if not completely crazy. I understand that, but I find it completely useless to plan things too far ahead. It is the best way to lose aim while making plans. I will think about what I wanna do after university once I am actually attending it, I will base my choice of which faculty to attend solely on how much I like the subject taught in the faculty. I don’t want to think too much in the long term, the only form of long-term plans I have are my dreams, but I have no intention to draw detailed plans right now. I think plans just work in the short term. This approach may come out as a complete failure and probably it will, I will figure it out during the next few months so that I can share with you my failures and my accomplishments (probably mostly my failures).

As I mentioned before, I love traveling, so my aim is to attend university abroad, this is quite an unusual choice since I am applying for a bachelor's program, and very few students choose to go abroad for their bachelor’s degree (more on that topic here). The reason why I do this is that going abroad will allow me to experience new things and be surrounded by a completely new environment. I do not know exactly why I find it fascinating, but I always loved it. During my second-last year of high school, I went abroad for half a year and the experience was absolutely magical, I got to learn so much simply by interacting with foreigners, and as long as I am this young (I’m in my last year of high school) I think it is time to travel as much as possible. I remember a couple of years ago I read Robinson Crusoe and I fell in love with this adventurous character and this sparked in me the desire to travel; it is not the 16th century anymore, so my way of doing it is quite different from Robinson's, but I’m actually happy I don’t have to deal with a horde of natives who just want to kill me and Friday.

I will keep writing about my deranged journey, this was just a small introduction, I will highlight both my mistakes and my achievements, and I hope you’ll enjoy it.