MOSAIC ’10
With MOSAIC weekend coming up in just two days, I started thinking about my own experience visiting Vanderbilt for MOSAIC two years ago, and how it helped me to decide that Vanderbilt was the place I was meant to be.
I’ll tell you the truth: I only applied to Vanderbilt for one reason–my sister lives in Nashville. I knew it was a good school, but I had never visited and hadn’t really looked into it much, aside from a superficial perusal of the website. (As a side note, a lot of colleges should really step it up on the website thing. Throughout the admissions process, my mom and I decided that the more confusing the website, the less we liked the school. Vanderbilt passed the website test, needless to say.) So I applied just to have the option of being close to my sister, and didn’t really think much about it after that.
Then, in February, I got an envelope in the mail inviting me to MOSAIC weekend. At first I didn’t understand that it meant that I had gotten accepted–I had my mom read the letter too, just to be sure. My excitement at being accepted was just moderate–I really knew nothing about the school. And then I went to MOSAIC.
While I was here for MOSAIC, I realized what an amazing place Vanderbilt truly is. There was so much going on on-campus, and my host and everyone I met was so incredibly nice, and the campus was beautiful, and it had everything I was looking for in a school, and the Commons was definitely alluring–I could go on forever. I made friends immediately, and I thought that if I made friends this easily at a weekend where I knew no one, maybe Vanderbilt was the place I was meant to be. The MOSAIC programming was super interesting and allowed me to see what Vanderbilt is all about–something that I really needed since I had never visited before.
After returning home and collecting the rest of my acceptance letters, it was finally May first. The notoriously indecisive part of me was not in a happy place. I had to choose between Vanderbilt and another of the best schools in the country. That day, when I looked back on my visits to each school, I couldn’t deny that the time I had at Vanderbilt was so much more of the college life that I was looking for–well-rounded students with amazing academic drive and an amazing social life that I didn’t have to leave campus for were the final aspects that tipped the scale in favor of Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt is a gorgeous place with amazing academics and where the students’ social lives don’t suffer as a consequence–it’s the best of both worlds.