Picture Perfect

Inundated by college mail since taking PSATs? I know. Stacks of glossy brochures peek out of your mailbox, and college emails fill the virtual one. I went a little crazy with all this mail. Each brochure was so pretty. I started collecting them in a box under my desk, because I couldn’t bear to part with them. Sometimes I would pull one out and thumb through it and imagine myself at the college.

It didn’t matter to me that the contents of the brochures were an unfair portrayal of college life. I knew that in reality college life consisted more of tired, hung-over students doing a half-assed job writing a 10-page paper due in an hour than of perky students dressed like catalog models lounging against a tree with a novel in hand. However, I let myself get pulled in by the pictures, and I fell in love with school after school.

This was not a problem until the fall of my senior year, when it came time to apply. I loved every one of the paper colleges that had taken up residence under my desk. How could I bear to part with any of them? I couldn’t. So I applied to them all.

Thirty college applications later, I found myself back where I had started. I still had to choose. Now, of course, I had a greater connection to each of these schools than a mere brochure. I had invested time and money in them. I couldn’t say goodbye. My parents, coaches, teachers, and guidance counselors all tried to talk some sense into me.

“You have to choose one eventually.”

“They are all different! How can you like them all?”

“You haven’t even visited most of them! Why are you so attached to them?”

“Choose a damn college!”

It was time to move past the paper and hit the road. My dad, a practical man, planned only to visit the colleges he believed were realistic choices. (Read: we visited very few of the many I applied to.)

Each was nice. The facilities were nice. The professors were nice. The food was nice. But that was the problem. Everything was nice, but it wasn’t what I had seen in the brochures. Something was missing. At times, the images were similar, but I never quite caught the feeling of perfection that I got from seeing the colleges on paper. I had been lied to (and I don’t like to be lied to).

Finally, as May 1, decision day, approached, my dad and I planned one last road trip. I was frantic by now. I wanted to find the perfect school, and that clearly was not happening. That morning I got up and pulled on a clingy striped turtleneck with dark-wash jeans. This was my college visiting outfit. Everything had to be the same, so if I ever caught the feeling I was looking for at a college, I would know the change had come from the school. The morning started out cloudy, but as we approached our final destination the sun emerged in full force. As my dad and I drove up Mayflower Hill, the Colby College campus was illuminated in all its glory. I took a deep breath and stepped out of the car.

It was a beautiful campus, but I could not let myself be fooled by pure beauty. I had seen it before in other campuses across New England. I stayed skeptical as we walked around. The feeling I was looking for probably didn’t even exist. Paper and real life are completely different.

But then we walked across the lawn near Cotter Union. I stopped. I felt a goofy grin spread across my face. Somewhere between the music blasting from the far side of the lawn and the students reading and golfing nearby, I found what I had been looking for—my paper-college world. This was an honest college. It was a college whose pretty brochures actually held reality in their pages.

My dad took one look at my face and breathed a deep sigh of relief. He pulled out his wallet and we headed right to the clothing section of the Colby bookstore to buy me a sweatshirt.

• Student Life