Seniors experience the social side of college during their visits

Senior Ethan Ngai woke up at 3 a.m., forgetting for a second where he was. When he remembered that he was in a dorm at Tufts University and why there were 15 students who did not belong to the school sleeping on his floor, he sighed and went back to sleep.
Ngai visited Tufts University in Massachusetts from Oct. 23-25. He spent two days sampling Tufts’ famously good food, sitting in on college classes and sleeping in college dorms.

Ngai also encountered the other side of the “college experience.” At one point during his time at Tufts, Ngai’s dorm roommate, a student who volunteered to host a high school student, invited him to a fraternity party — one part of college that Ngai has been dreading.

“I kind of chickened out because I was like ‘Um, no. I’m a good kid,’” Ngai said.

Instead, he went to an ice cream social. According to Ngai, his roommate “didn’t look so good when I saw him in the morning.”

Adding to the erratic events that Ngai encountered during his brief college experience were the 15 protesters sleeping on the floor of the dorm he was staying in. They were from Georgia, and they were protesting the mistreatment of the Israelis in Gaza. Ngai’s host was one of the organizers of the group, and since they did not have any place to stay, they crashed in Ngai’s dorm.

Despite some of the nerve-racking parts of the experience, Ngai said the tasty food made up for some of it. He liked how classes at Tufts assigned papers and readings rather than worksheets as in high school. He also found the people there to be helpful.

“One of the things that I really liked about the campus was that I never had to open my map because every single time I started to there would be a person who would be like, ‘Hey, do you need help?’” Ngai said.

Senior Randy Tsai, who has visited universities such as Stanford, Brown and University of California, Los Angeles, said that in a way the school campuses reminded him of his old home of Taiwan.

“A lot of places [in Taiwan] were a lot like [college campuses],” Tsai said. “It’s usually like one university and the city around it is built around to encompass [the university’s] needs.”

Tsai was able to talk to students and attend a few classes since he chose to do a self-guided tour.

“I spent time walking around campus and observing how students interacted with each other,” Tsai said. “And I loved it. It was very different from the somewhat cliquey nature of Saratoga students because I could see people with all different interests chatting with each other.”

Senior Jennifer McAfee, who visited and toured Santa Clara University, had an eye-opening experience when she realized that whatever college she chose would be her home for the next four years.

“It really hit me that by this time next year I will be moved in to a dorm full time, not with my family, for the first time ever,” McAfee said.

McAfee found the Santa Clara campus beautiful and calm, and the people there really accepting and welcoming. Surrounded by new people, she considered how going to college would mean starting with a clean slate.

“We’ve been going to school with the same kids, [some] since kindergarten, and we will be graduating with those people,” McAfee said. “[When we go to college] we will be with a new population of people who we won’t know. It will be a great opportunity to meet new people.”