Senior Column: Learning To See the Positives When It Is Not Always Easy

by Jack DeGonia ’19

My quest to play lacrosse in college was a major driving force in where I applied to schools and what I looked for in each one of them. In addition to the standard requirements, such as how well I liked the school, and if they had my major or not, I had to look into their lacrosse program. After a while, I found a college that I thought was right for me, a school in New York called Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). I reached out to the coach and ended up committing to play there. I was accepted to the school and received financial aid, but not enough. After appealing it multiple times, I was forced to give up and ended up putting my deposit down for the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), another technical school up north in New York.

Throughout nearly the entire process I was sure that RPI would somehow work out for me, but it never did. This experience has given me somewhat of a taste of what the real world is going to be like, more specifically that anything, no matter how well you think it will go, always has a chance of going wrong. Because of this, I realized that it is always best to have more than one option that you are more than willing to go with. I would have preferred to go to RPI, but RIT is still a great fit for me with the only downside being that I’m not committed to play lacrosse there. I might have loved it at RPI, or I might have hated it, but there is no way to tell now. I just need to work with what I have. Focusing on what could have been will only make you miss what you have right now, even if its not exactly what you thought you wanted.