Narrative Essay

Matt Sullivan

The Night My Life Changed Forever

My life changed forever in the late evening hours of February 20th, 2011. It was Presidents’ Day weekend and my mother and I had traveled down to Washington, D.C. to do some college visits. It was a perfect opportunity to get away from the city of Philadelphia and get a little vacation, while still being rather productive. At this time, I was still of the mindset that I wanted nothing to do with Philadelphia after I graduated high school; all I really wanted to do was get away so I wouldn’t have to deal with my family and be too close to home. I was still rather naïve and really lacked true perspective about things such as tuition costs and the logistics of traveling to and from college. I was very raw when it came to college decision making.

The weekend had been pretty normal, with most of the time spent walking around college campuses and hearing various admissions officers and professors pitch their programs to us as if each school were the number one school in the nation. Colleges have the ability to make prospective students think they could spend the rest of their lives on their campuses and never feel any desire to leave. (Now, as a college student myself, there are few things I appreciate more than being able to leave campus every so often and soak in the comfortable, welcoming feeling that comes with being in my own bed. I quickly came to realize that there are certain things about home that a college campus can never reproduce.) After visiting American University, the final stop on my short college tour, my mother and I decided to grab some dinner nearby at the Cheesecake Factory. Over dinner, we discussed the colleges we had seen that weekend. Georgetown, we both agreed, was really beautiful, while American was thoroughly underwhelming for the both of us. One of my earliest criteria was to be near a big city, but not directly in the middle of one. Though both universities were within the...