answer:I hadn’t even heard of [college I ended up going to] until it was already about time to start applying. I went to a college fair and saw their booth. I was mostly applying the *PI’s and *IT’s close to home in NY, of which there were a few, but I made two exceptions and applied to MIT and [college I ended up going to], both in Massachusetts. When I toured the colleges I applied to, RIT and RPI bummed me out and I knocked them off the list. MIT rejected me. Left only Cornell and [college I ended up going to]. 5 years prior, my dad had been laid off in such a way that contradicted some contract his employer had signed, and he had grounds for a lawsuit. It dragged on and on until the year before I went to college, at which time won a good chunk of money. Colleges only look at your parents’ last year of income so they thought we were mad rich, even though we were struggling because my dad had been unemployed for 2 years. Cornell doesn’t give out any merit based aid because obviously everyone who gets into an ivy league school has merit. They also didn’t give me any need based aid because they thought I didn’t need it. My dad argued with them and they wouldn’t budge. So between the fact that I couldn’t afford it, and also the fact that there were suicide nets all over the gorge, I was turned off by Cornell and ended up choosing [college I ended up going to]. I was slated to be in the class of 2014. But we all know because I’ve overshared here for years and years that I got set back a year by my health. On my first day back at college I sat down next to a pair of freshman guys in the front row and somehow managed to royally fuck up removing the cap from my water bottle in such a fashion that about half of the bottle ended up all over me. One of those guys and I quickly became fast friends and I guess the water incident left a somewhat memorable impression because, although I didn’t get to know the other guy that well at first, he still always recognized me around campus and said hi when he saw me. About a year and a half later, I chose to do my junior project during the summer in order to catch up on some of the credits I was missing due to my health mishaps, and it just so happens that guy #2 from the water incident was also behind on classes because he was pursuing an ambitious double major, so he signed up for the project too. We became best friends during our seven weeks in Maine working on that project. It’s a few years later now and he’s my boyfriend of 2 years and we live together.