It is finished

Wow! I am going to law school next year. Man, it was tough. Ok, let's do the long and short of it. I applied to FSU, USC, Pepperdine, U Chicago, Loyola Chicago, Northwestern, Northeastern, Boston College, Boston U, NYU, Fordham, UPenn, and Rutgers-Camden. I never heard from BU nor UPenn (weird!). U Chicago waitlisted me. The rest accepted me.

Quickly, as shown by my previous message, it became the battle of two schools: Loyola Chicago and NYU. And deciding b/n the two was maybe the most difficulty and draining thing I have ever done (side note: I really think that this statement is true, which says a lot about the tough times in my life. I'm a lucky kid).

One the one hand, Loyola is a great Jesuit school, filled with a tradition of social justice, spirituality, and a high percentage of law students that go into public interest. But the kicker is this. They offered me full tuition, and I was the inaugural recipient of the award. What a gift!

On the other hand, NYU is the fourth ranked law school in the most recent US News and World Report rankings, has a serious interest in public interest (though it is most definitely populated by people who will most likely work for big time firms for big time money), and offered me $15,000 a year (tuition is $39k).

The debates in my head were almost a grueling with the debate I had with my dad. That was terrible. In the end, I am going to NYU. I am very VERY excited about going there, but I still feel very sad about turning down such an amazing gift. They give 3 full tuition scholarships, all in honor of different contributers to LUC. I felt blessed to have that distinction given to me.

In the end two things struck me and lead me to choose NYU over LUC (many of the other considerations made the schools pretty evenly matched). One, I don't think that not wanting to turn down a scholarship is not reason enough to choose one school over another. And, more importantly, New York offered me family. My cousins live in Queens. Monica's family lives in Philly and has family in NYC.

Man, that was hard to do. I need to recoup so I can truly be psyched about going to NYU. The Big Apple. Gotham City. Sweet.