Today was the last day of my college trip, and it had been nevertheless the most exciting and busy day since I started the non-stop college visits along the east coast.
  
   I was probably too excited about trips to Amherst and Harvard yesterday night, and I accidentally misread the campus tour hour for that of the information session at Amherst. It was supposed to start at nine o'clock in the morning, but my family didn't drive off until eight thirteen, and it's one and half hour drive from where we stayed to Amherst. It was a silent ride with anger filled in the car: my mom was blaming me and my dad, and I was blaming my mom and myself, my dad was just driving and driving, definitely not feeling very good as well. As soon as we got at the admission office, the nine o'clock info session was already over, and we had to first attend the campus tour and go to the information session after that. Looking back, I actually felt lucky to have missed the nine o'clock session, since it was packed with almost forty people (prospective students and their families), whereas the session I attended later had a much smaller crowd and I experienced a very personal and intimate conversation with the admission dean and a current student at the college.

   Amherst was founded by a faculty member who used to work at Williams, and the rivalry between these two colleges was deeply rooted in their history. I hadn't visited Williams, so I couldn't tell which one was better; but as far as I was concerned, Amherst was beyond beautiful. It was located in a town small enough for everyone to feel close to each other (including the residents, or the "townies") and big enough to have restaurants and shopping centers. The buildings at Amherst were all indicating the old history of the college. Unlike Middlebury or Swarthmore, Amherst did not have brown houses (which in my opinion was equal to or close to the definition of "ugly"), but was filled with red-bricked buildings like those of Harvard, Princeton, Brown and other old big ivies.
   We were also led into a freshman dorm during the campus tour. The rooms were spacial but cozy, and each dorm also had a huge common room in which freshmen could socialize and bond with each other. One good thing about the campus tours at small liberal arts colleges was that these schools had a much smaller size than big universities, so that they enjoyed a much smaller visiting crowd. Therefore we were often allowed to go into each buildings to have a sneak peak at what it felt like to be in those parts of the colleges, whereas in bigger universities we could only ramble around the lecture halls or libraries, and have no memories of what those buildings were like by the time the tour was over.

   The info session at Amherst after the tour was the most special one of all the info sessions I'd been to during my college trip. Instead of cramming us into a lecture room with rows after rows of chairs, the admission officers were sitting in a conference room with all the visitors. The conference room identified with a real seminar class setting, and students were all sitting on the leather chairs around a huge round table. The admission dean didn't just lecture on us, she had interactive conversations with us. There was also a rising sophomore who sat between her, and every time when she finished talking about a specific part of the college, the student would add some real life experiences at the college related to that topic, so that our understandings about that area and the college as a whole had been enriched and extended to a huge degree. It was absolutely a very informative and interactive period of time, and I fell in love with the school and the people right away.

   The two very special things about Amherst are its open curriculum and the five-college conjunction. Unlike Columbia, which puts a strong emphasis on its core curriculum, Amherst does not force its students to attend a certain class. Every time when a student walks into the classroom, he or she is attending a course that he or she is passionate about. No students will even go to a class that they hate; it's a great way to make sure that everyone is a hundred percent focused on and interested in what is being taught to them. The five-college conjunction basically means resources-sharing with four other colleges around the Amherst college. The other colleges are: Smith, Umass at Amherst, Hampshire, and Mount Holyoke. The students at these five colleges and take classes, join clubs, borrow books from libraries, and even eat at dining halls of all the other four colleges. Every college is a top educational institution in the country with great amount of resources, and times those resources by five, you've got basically all the things that you need for four years of college education.
   Amherst has impressed in terms of the resources that it provides, and the accessibility of the its faculty members; no wonder it was once one of Jon's top choices for college.

   After Amherst we'd got only two hours to drive to Cambridge and attend the information session at Harvard. I really couldn't wait to go back the place where I had spent my entire summer last year. Though I had stayed in that university for that long, I'd never been to their undergraduate admission sessions or official campus tours, and honestly speaking, I was a little disappointed at both after having experienced them today.
   The theater in which the information session took place was packed with ambitious students and even more ambitious parents, most of whom were Asians. I was one of the only two students who asked questions during the Q&A; other questions were all asked by parents of the prospective students.
   There were two current students at Harvard college who showed up during the info session to answer the questions. I asked what makes Harvard or Harvard students different from other colleges or other college students, and their answers were all the same: the people. I had long expected that answer, and I kind of hoped they could surprise me. That's the answer for Princeton, Swarthmore, UPenn, Columbia, Amherst, and pretty much every other colleges that I'd visited. I could understand why they said that, because they truly felt that way; but still, I was a little bit disappointed that they didn't come up with anything new. If I hadn't heard of any of the colleges I visited, and had no idea about their history, ranking, etc., and I was asked to pick the top three colleges only based on the information sessions and campus tours they offered, I would choose Amherst, Princeton, and Middlebury. Go down that list, I would have NYC, Columbia, Swarthmore, Harvard, UPenn, and Dartmouth. MIT and Brown came last because I only had a small talk around the campus without any tour guide or basic introduction of these colleges.

   We had a nice walk along the Charles River to appreciate the main building of MIT after dinner, and curiously my parents had a good impression about the school, though the entire walk lasted for less than fifteen minutes and we didn't talk to anyone during that time. My mom said she felt everyone on campus was so "nice", and I really did not know on which factor was that feeling based. My dad said that they were so many Asians at MIT. Who else would be nerdy enough to attend a college like this one? Long long time ago when I was still a very "scientific" person, I used to think that I might actually end up here (I told you, it was long long time ago, and I was definitely very naive and innocent at that time to even think of myself having the possibility to go to MIT), but as time went by my brain capacity was eventually too small to even remember my interest in the school. Now when I think of MIT, the images of old professors with thick and cloudy glasses writing something so sophisticated that it no longer fit in the range of human language, and students with classes even thicker and cloudier than those of the professors' staring through the blackboard into the unfathomable black hole named "science" will swirl around my brain and scare me off. My mom tried to persuade me to take a picture at MIT, but I ran away like a rabbit. It's not because of my stupid superstition that if somebody took a picture of me inside a college, I would never be accepted by that college, but because I really couldn't associate myself with MIT, and I hope I would have nothing to do with it.
  
   Today was a very lovely day. I got to go back to places that were once so familiar to me: Science Center, Thayer Hall, Widener Library, and Harvard Square, and I even had my favorite coffee frappes from J.P Licks and Thai food in Spice Thai Cuisine around Harvard Square. When my dad tried to drive back to my mom's friend's house, we were a little off the hook and ended off driving aimlessly around downtown Boston, another area that felt so familiar and so close to me. Boston was a lovely city, and I had actually planned a whole lot more things to do there before the trips. Hopefully I got to visit the place sometime later during high school.

   Tomorrow will mark the end of my college trips along the east coast, and I definitely feel like the ten-day trip has helped me understand not only colleges, but also myself better. After having been in those colleges and talked to students from those institutions, I have a better sense of which kind of school will be a better fit for me, not for my parents or my previous expectations. Even though there's still a year at least for me to really set my hands on college application, I need to start to think about some basic questions that might need a long time to answer. For example, why do I need to go to college? To get a piece of paper after four years? To fulfill the society's definition of "success"? Also, why do I need to go to a top college? To have fancy name on that piece of paper? To impress my old classmates when having a reunion ten years later? And what do I expect to get out of a college education? Four years of bonding with people of my age? A connection that might help me during job hunt?
   True, I might already have some answers to those questions on the table, but nonetheless there are so many other factors that need to be taken into consideration. The college application, in the end, will not only be a process of discovering colleges, but also and foremost a process of discovering myself. And education goes well beyond college; it should never be the end of period but the beginning of a longer one.
  
   I appreciate the time I've spent with my lovely parents and many other friends during these ten days, and I wish it will be the start of an enlightening and inspiring journey to find out what I want to do, why I want to do it, and who I want to become after I've done it.