Things are so different now. I’ve always said I could never get accepted to the schools now as I did before. I applied to 3 schools: Stanford, UCB and UCD ONLY because I lived in the bay area at the time. I had NO idea those are top schools, no idea of ranking, no idea they were reach or high reach, no idea what I eventually got myself into lol. I was so clueless. I was all alone, no one there to guide me, I filled out the paper application forms and mailed them in. I got accepted to all 3, and I picked UCB because I lived in Berkeley. I didn’t have money to move, nor did i prefer one school over another. I was in America and I got to go to college, that was more than anything I could ever dreamed of. Stanford, Berkeley, Davis…all the same to me. Not until I met my hubby at Cal that he told me that Stanford and Cal were such a big deal. There is a proverb in my culture, something like if you are deaf you are not afraid of gunshots. That was me.
Now there are so much information out there, it is overwhelming. Life was so much simpler back then.