I think it took me all of five days in Italy to call my mom and effectively tell her I wasn’t coming home. I’ve been studying abroad at the University of Bologna for the past two months now, and while my friends here are starting to miss American university life, I really can’t say the same. It’s not that the Italian university system objectively functions better or that I haven’t experienced culture shock or cognitive dissonance; but by and large, my transition has been relatively seamless.
The people have been extremely friendly, willing to overlook my constant grammatical mistakes and happy to explain things over and over again. The city, with its towering doors and sweeping porticos, looks like a movie set in the middle ages. There is always some sort of vintage market, art show or musical performance in the many piazzas, and everyone takes advantage of them. The cafes are bustling and the coffee is fantastic. I, for once, don’t even mind the small talk with the bartender when I get my morning cappuccino.
“Why didn’t I leave sooner?” I found myself asking my mom as I sat in the courtyard of one of Bologna’s many palazzos, the sky bright blue, even in early January. “Why did I never take transferring out of Michigan seriously?”
***
The moment I opened my decision letter lives in this special corner of my mind that is reserved for the memories that keep me up at night: my first kiss, the time I dapped up a guy I liked who was going in for a hug, the horrible TikTok I posted during quarantine that went viral — you get the gist. I hadn’t exactly been refreshing my inbox with bated breath, so when I clicked through my emails to the maize-and-blue confetti that announced my acceptance, it was a few hours later than most of my future classmates. I told my mom and my grandmother, and then went back to work on my AP Gov essay.
For many, seeing that confetti was a dream come true. For me, it was a weight off my shoulders. I had been accepted somewhere — at the very least, I would be going to college in the fall.Now I was free to dream about the other 14 schools I had applied to. I was sure that my acceptance to the University of Michigan was the first of many. In reality, it was my last.
I went to a high school that worked us to the bone and then some, but there was some sort of pride in the suffering that we went through; we were ranked in the top three public schools in the state every year, and the teachers never failed to remind us how lucky we were to attend the illustrious Bronx High School of Science. We weren’t there because it was fun or even particularly academically engaging. It was a lot of spitting out answers like the goldfish you win at the state fair spits out air bubbles: habitual, but on the verge of collapse. No, we were there to get into a good college, and even if that wasn’t why you enrolled there in the first place, it was why you stayed — it was why I stayed.
I’m not going to regale you with college statistics from my high school — that won’t do anyone any good, least of all myself — but I will direct you to The Michigan Daily’s own data project from a few years back. The Daily highlighted the 10 high schools that send the most amount of students to the University. Nine out of those 10 are in the state of Michigan. The other one? My beloved alma mater. Altogether, those 10 high schools make up more than 10% of the undergraduate student population here at the University of Michigan, meaning that going to Michigan wasn’t exactly considered exceptional at my high school, where exceptional was the expectation.
“Were you too white to get in anywhere else?,” my basketball coach asked me one day in late April, when the sun was shining, when my new shoes did not yet have scuffs. “You can always transfer,” said the adviser of the student newspaper, smiling pitifully at me as I handed in my edits. “I’m not really sure what to tell you,” my guidance counselor said, looking at the 16 other schools that had rejected me, many less competitive than Michigan itself. The unexceptional goldfish inside of me let out one last tiny blup of air and went belly up.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like Michigan; in fact, I grew up a Michigan fan. There are plenty of pictures of me and my younger brother in maize-and-blue apparel or holding up block ‘M’ cookies. I always chose the basketball team to go far in my March Madness brackets, regardless of their talent, statistics and usually mediocre seeding. It’s not even that I think Michigan is a bad university.
But I’m not entirely sure why I applied to the University, or honestly, why I still attend this school. I wasn’t interested in football or Greek life — the two greatest U-M exports, according to my internet searches. I wanted an open curriculum, hoping that the option of choice would lead to people in my classes who were genuinely interested in the topics we were discussing, which, outside of the major-regulated classes, I haven’t found. It is the whitest school I have ever gone to, incredibly racially segregated and, god, the social conformity is mind-blowing. I’ve never met more people who suppress their true interests to go along with the group, something that has always been wholly at odds with my personality, for better or worse. I wasn’t interested in a large research university, and I didn’t dream of STEM. I wanted to have intimate writers workshops and create long-lasting relationships with professors, not sit in a 300-person lecture hall three times a week. Nothing I wanted to do outside of class was readily available to me, either; I had come into college hoping to join a club basketball team and write for a literary magazine — the girl’s club basketball team didn’t exist until this semester, and I couldn’t access The Statement’s application for a good year and a half.
I applied to college thinking I would go to a small liberal arts school, hopefully somewhere near a major city, even-more-hopefully somewhere close-but-not-quite-in New York. I wanted to get out of the city, out of my parents’ apartment, to find myself, to become the new and improved Lucy, to happen upon interesting people who would drag me along on fantastical and enriching adventures, to engage in new creative outlets and grow into a writer that made people want to cut sentences out and stick them on their wall while still dedicating myself to the 10-year plan of history major, then law school, then a clerkship, and by the time I was there, I would finally be happy, be satisfied, have achieved enough. Was this even possible? No, obviously not. But more generally, I wanted growth, I wanted new experiences, I wanted exciting chaos that eventually made me a well-rounded and adjusted adult.
Instead of that lovely mental Pinterest board, I lived the entire first semester of freshman year with an apartment lease on one half of my computer screen and the Common Application transfer portal on the other. When I ended up signing the lease, committing myself to a second year at Michigan, I was happy for all of 20 minutes before I found myself sobbing in my Bursley Residence Hall twin-XL bed. I was staying, and worst of all, I had signed my own death warrant.
I hated it at Michigan. I think I liked it more before I became a U-M student at this university. My closest friends freshman year were all people who also wanted to transfer, a miserable bunch whose dreamy college ideals were dying in front of their very eyes. I couldn’t bear the people who were ecstatic to be here; they seemed blissfully unaware of what could have been, and I envied them for it. Of course, they weren’t, but I was so wretchedly dejected that I couldn’t imagine someone being elated about the University of Michigan. It seemed that I was constantly unhappy, constantly crying: in the Grove, on the Diag, in the Big House, in the Michigan Union Basement. My parents, grandparents and therapist all told me that this was a normal, transitory period — it was hard to leave home, so of course I was struggling while adjusting to a new place — but I insisted that I hated it here.
Yet, I stayed. I think because I wanted to believe my parents, grandparents and therapist; I wanted to believe that I, too, would soon see the world through maize-and-blue-colored glasses, that I, too, would bleed Wolverine blood, that I would eventually get over my senseless dislike of this place and come to love it like everyone else, that I hadn’t worked myself to the bone and killed that stupid silly little goldfish for no reason. And you know what? Two years later, I can say that, on the whole, I enjoy my life at Michigan — I love my friends, my professors are usually kind and engaging, and The Daily’s newsroom has become a second home — but I still find myself grating against the University, sanding down its edges in order to make it a place where I feel at home and perhaps sanding myself down, too, along the way.
I came into this school extremely dedicated and extremely creative. I feel like I’m leaving with none of those traits. U-M culture has sucked the creativity and curiosity off of my bones and then licked its fingers clean. Finding places and people that make me feel excited to be there is a Sisyphean task because I know that at the end of the day, the Michigan ideal doesn’t exist for people like me. This school’s culture is deeply incongruent with who I am on a personal level, and while I made my own little niche, it took me throwing myself against the walls hard enough to leave a dent.
I convinced myself that no college would be perfect, that I would have had an inconsolably miserable phase wherever I went, that transferring was futile because I would inevitably hate it there too, or worse, that I would miss Michigan and if I was going to miss Michigan, what was I making such a big fuss about anyways? So it was with this transitory period in mind that I prepared to go to Bologna.
But Bologna didn’t require a transitory period. Or, well, that’s not entirely true. I didn’t speak Italian well enough for the first month to really understand my classes or even speak to my roommates about anything beyond what I had for lunch or what city I was visiting for the weekend. I felt like a freshman all over again, constantly taking wrong turns on my way to meet my friends. But that period of deep, inconsolable sadness, that gut feeling that something was wrong, that I was out of place in an irreparable way, never reared its ugly head.
Bologna has everything that I wanted out of a college experience: charming old buildings, beautiful libraries beaming with natural light and the dusty smell of old books, walkable streets, more bars and cafes than I could possibly try in four years and the types of people I had been digging through haystacks to find at Michigan — this was the dream I had been dreaming since I began high school, college, that shimmering ideal that I had stopped letting myself think about the minute I signed that lease instead of clicking over to the Common App.
I don’t regret my decision to come to the University of Michigan. Not only did I lack an alternative, I learned that I can make anything into a viable option — a good skill and empowering self-knowledge. But, god, I think my biggest regret is not transferring from Michigan, not giving myself the chance to hold that glimmering utopia in my hands, to make it reality, to experience the kind of joy and love that my friends who love this school have felt for the last three years.
As Isaac Asimov wrote, “Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil — but there is no way around them.” There is no way around being unchosen by your top 16 choices of universities. There is no way around attending the only school that has accepted you. But if you feel like I felt, there is a way around that. The devil you know is sometimes worse than the devil you don’t. And even if it’s not, the what ifs, the could haves, the regrets of it all might just eat you alive regardless.
Statement Contributor Lucy Del Deo can be reached at ldeldeo@umich.edu.