It's in Ada not Columbus

    As an international student applying to colleges online, you really don't know where you're going until you're there in person. Let me take you all back to March 2020 when schools had been closed for over three months due to COVID-19, and this high school senior had just received his denial letter from the Canadian embassy stating that the country was no longer accepting international students because of COVID-19. I was devastated when I received that letter because I had already been accepted and given a full ride to one of the best colleges in Ontario, Canada. So, what was my next move?

My dad always said to never put your eggs in one basket, so what did I do? I started applying to colleges in the U.S. through a non-profit organization that simplifies students' college application journeys called the Common App. The Common App is where I found ONU, the place where I would make the best memories of my life, meet my soon-to-be best friends, and a place I would call home for the next four years of my life. You see, after I got accepted to ONU, I was thrilled. Within two weeks of sending my application, I had heard back from the school, which then allowed me to make an appointment at the American embassy where I was told I could travel to the U.S. for my studies.

Okay, great! I got accepted to a school, and the country that I'm going to is also accepting international students, which was another check mark on the list. Now to the next step: doing my research on the school. My parents and I received the whole shebang! I mean, we got shirts mailed to us, binders, pens—all the merch you get during orientation, I got. My oldest sister started looking up the college; it looked beautiful, the student-to-faculty ratio was amazing, and most of all, the school offered the program I wanted to go into. What really caught my parents' attention was in one of the pop-up Google searches, it said, "If you're looking to party, ONU is NOT the school for you." Keep in mind, I wasn't looking to party, but that being said, I'm from the city. I love the buildings, the people, and even the traffic—it gives me a thrill. This is where "It's Ada, not Columbus" comes in.

When I personally looked up ONU and how far it was from Columbus, because I wanted to know how far I would be from my two friends who had been accepted to OSU, I'm not lying when I say it said ONU was a 15-minute drive from Columbus. And if you've ever been to Ada, you know for a fact that ONU is not 15 minutes away from Columbus; rather, it's a one-hour drive.

So, without doing any further research, I booked my flight to Detroit, Michigan, where an ONU shuttle would pick me up from the airport by an international student greeter. What I was not expecting was for everything to be gray. In my defense, I've been to the U.S. several times, but every time I came, it was during the summer, so I had no idea all the leaves would fall off, it would get dark at 4 pm, or that literally everything would turn gray in the winter. The ride began; I'm sitting in the van just passing cornfield after cornfield for almost three hours without seeing a single building. We then slowly made our way to ONU without me even noticing we had arrived in this little town called Ada.

As soon as I got out of the car, the wind from the open field—aka the tundra—just slapped me in the face. I was in shock. I had also arrived two weeks prior to when students would be returning from winter break, which meant the campus was basically empty. As soon as I got in my dorm room, I connected to the Wi-Fi and tried to get an Uber to go out to Columbus. Little did I know, Uber didn't exist in a small town like Ada. What was my second move? I immediately looked up how far Ada was from Columbus for the second time, and to my surprise, it was a one-hour and 30-minute drive. I was shocked. Everything just hit me at once: the loneliness, the cold, the gushing wind. I immediately got on the phone with my parents. I told them that I wanted to go back, that I didn't want to do it anymore. My father said to give it until the first two weeks of classes before I made my decision, and I agreed.

I called back home two weeks after classes started. My parents, nervous about the decision I was about to make, heard me tell them that I loved it out here. Even though I missed the buildings, being able to call an Uber at any moment, and most of all, the mall, within two weeks, little Ada and ONU had convinced me to stay and call it home for four years.

P.S. Lesson to be learned: Do the necessary research, everyone, and if you don't, try to trust the process. You never know what might just happen!