Mara Goldstein (C’27) is a Georgetown Storyteller and a junior in the College of Arts & Sciences from Pearl City, Hawai’i, studying justice & peace studies and English.
Choosing which college to attend can feel like the most stressful decision of your life — the place you choose determines what the next four years of your life will look like. Here are some of the questions that I had when trying to decide whether I should commit to Georgetown, and how I would answer them now as a junior.
1. What was the transition between high school and college like?
At first, the transition was really difficult. I hated leaving my room because it felt like it took so much energy to talk to people and try to make friends. I spent a lot of time speed-walking off-campus and blasting music in my headphones when I felt frustrated or embarrassed, or calling my friends from home. My coursework was hard to keep up with, but I soon grew accustomed to it. My social battery, on the other hand, felt like it was being pushed to its limits constantly.
But that’s the price of moving away from home — stumbling over your mistakes and trying your best to make new friends is all a part of the process of becoming. I eventually found my place within Georgetown and grew to love making new friends.
2. What does your daily life look like?
On a typical school day, I’ll wake up around two hours before my first class. I like to wake up late, so most of my classes start after 10 am. I try to stick to two classes a day so that my workload on any given night isn’t too heavy, especially because I have a tendency to procrastinate until the night before. Between classes, I’ll eat lunch and go to my campus job as a student assistant at the Women’s Center. After classes and work, I eat dinner and either attend club meetings or hang out with my friends. Sometimes we’ll stay in and watch TV or do work, or on a warm day, we’ll try to get a late-night cookie or boba. If I don’t have any plans, I might just lie in bed and do work. My night typically ends with some alone time while I prepare to go to sleep.
Before coming to Georgetown, it was difficult to imagine what my life would look like, especially as someone who had never lived in a dorm before. It’s more fast-paced than I ever would have expected, but it was a welcome change that I quickly got accustomed to. My favorite change within my daily life is that all of my friends live within walking distance. On any given day, I might text a friend to hang out or study together past midnight, and because we live so close to each other on a safe campus, it is incredibly easy to spend more time with the people I love.
3. What is the campus culture like at Georgetown?
Campus culture revolves mostly around extracurricular clubs. I’ve met most of my friends through the clubs that I’m a part of, although I’ve made many friends in other places too, like in class or even through Instagram. A common misconception of Georgetown is that you have to apply to every club you want to be a part of, and your acceptances will make or break your social life. The majority of the clubs that I am a part of are open access, meaning that anyone who wants to participate in their events is allowed to join. Whether it be club sports, acapella, affinity, divinity, etc., there is most likely a club dedicated to meeting other people with similar interests that anyone can easily join.
That being said, Georgetown’s culture is generally pre-professional. Most people will complete several internships while at Georgetown. Going to school in DC is perfect for doing internships related to government, international relations, etc., so many people take advantage of Georgetown’s location to fulfill their career aspirations. At the end of the day, the pre-professional culture is what you make of it, and though there is some pressure to network and get professional experience, each person can participate in it to the degree that they are comfortable with. I know people who have a new internship every semester and enjoy working at the same time as being a full-time student and people who have never had an internship before, and both have found their place at Georgetown.
Another key part of Georgetown’s culture is being in DC. It’s not difficult to leave Georgetown and to experience what DC, though many people do get busy quickly and don’t make time to leave the Georgetown area. Escaping Georgetown is made easy through DC’s public transportation system and the shuttles that the school provides between metro stations and campuses.
It can be difficult to make time for yourself to leave the area, but most of the time, if I send a Google Calendar invite (another Georgetown staple) to a friend with a time and a plan, they’ll accept the invite or suggest another time. Just the other week, my friend and I blocked out a time to go to walk to the cherry blossoms at Tidal Basin together. We spent around two hours outside of Georgetown, and made it back in time for her to get ready for dance practice that night. The school’s culture runs on things like schedules, but they enable us to create memories while balancing the many things that are important to us.
4. Why did you decide to move so far away from home?
I decided to move so far away from home because I’d always fantasized about life on the East Coast, about experiencing winter and snow and the changing leaves for the first time, and about all of the museums and organizations based in DC and New York City. I dreamed about living in a walkable city, where my distaste for driving would be acceptable because I could walk as far as my legs could take me without walking next to a major highway, or because I could easily take a train.
But the biggest challenge to my fantasies was learning how to be independent while being so far from home, and accepting the obstacles that come my way in a place that is completely different from everything I have ever known. As a student from Hawai’i, Georgetown with its chilly winters and fast-paced life was completely different from the slow heat that I have known my entire life.
I hadn’t had to make friends in years, and part of me forgot how difficult it was to talk to strangers. I didn’t have any friends on campus, and no one else from my high school committed to Georgetown. But it was something I felt that I had to do. I needed to move away from everything I knew and experience something that was completely different so that I could learn even more about myself and meet new people with different life experiences.
I also had to learn that it’s okay to spend time alone, and that once you move away from home, you spend a lot of time alone. It took time before I was able to gather the courage to sit in the dining hall alone, and to be honest, I still don’t really go to the gym alone (although that’s mostly because I don’t like working out in public). Being alone was at first kind of miserable, but I grew to really enjoy spending time with my own thoughts and going on my own personal adventures. I used to force myself to walk outside when the weather was nice, and I’ve walked all over the city now because of it. Sometimes if I feel tired or down, I’ll go on a walk by myself and bring my camera or a book and spend a few hours alone recharging. Even now, when I have a strong support system and many friends whom I love, I still enjoy walking around on my own and taking in the world and all of the things I’m worried about at my own pace.
5. What made you choose Georgetown?
Every Georgetown applicant has to write a page-long essay about why they want to attend Georgetown, and during my research for this essay, I fell in love with the school. I found myself daydreaming about going to the farmer’s market on Wednesdays and sipping Georgetown Bubble boba with my friends while tanning on the lawn. I thought about what it would be like to have classes in Healy Hall, or attend speaker events in Gaston. I pictured myself sitting at tables in Lau and highlighting passages of my readings in pastel pink, then flipping through the pages to say something insightful in a class in White-Gravenor. I first grew to love Georgetown from an aesthetic distance, but I started to worry about whether my romanticized perspective of Georgetown was real or if I had created a world of my own that didn’t actually exist.
For me, the most important things to me were being on a campus in a community that felt in between the bigness of a state school and the smallness of a liberal arts college, being in a big city, and being at a place where my intellect would be challenged through difficult concepts and real-world opportunities. Georgetown was the only school that had all of that. Throughout my time at Georgetown, I’ve had the opportunity to attend events at the United Nations, listen to incredible speakers like Salman Rushdie, and learn from professors who have changed my entire perspective on things like how we remember history, how we learn new things, and how fluid the humanities can be.
6. What are some of your favorite memories of Georgetown?
Over my three years at Georgetown, most of my favorite memories have been from ordinary days that became incredibly meaningful to me, usually because of some amazing and lovely coincidence.
My favorite memory from my freshman year was during finals week of my freshman fall. I had already met my best friend, and we decided to study together. We found a table in the Healy Family Student Center and started to work on our respective papers and assignments. After a little while, a mutual friend of ours walked past us and asked if they could join us. Soon, more and more people had joined us at our table, and we would take occasional breaks together to talk or get a bite to eat. I made new friends through the friends who stopped by, and at midnight, we ventured out into the cold and the rain to get food at this halal food truck outside of the library. I was shivering in my sweatpants as we waited for our food, but laughing together with my new friends made it feel a little less cold. When we finished our studying (after moving to the library), I walked outside and saw flurries of snow for the first time in my life. The snow didn’t stick yet, but it felt so magical to see it for the first time with people who I had grown so close to so quickly. After that day, we set up a time each week to get dinner together.
