I remember in August 2022, right before my senior year of high school started, the subject of college and college application season was extremely prominent. My whole life, I did not really care too much about which specific university to attend, as long as the school had a ‘U’ in the name somewhere. At the time, I was extensively involved with my high school’s Honors String Orchestra as the viola section leader, and thought that I wanted to pursue music as an academic career. I thought Cal Poly SLO was my dream school because it was one of two colleges I had visited in middle school for a music field trip, and I had fallen in love with the campus.
This is when my mom told me to consider USC because at the time, she read an article stating that the Thornton School of Music was the 3rd best music school in the states. I considered it, but did not focus on it primarily until I was assigned college research for my Expository Reading and Writing Course. To fill a space, I looked into USC. Upon discovering that Thornton offered the perfect hybrid of technology and music, the foundations of my career interests, I instantly thought to myself, “I have to go to this school.”
It was not only my mom who motivated me to pursue USC, but very significant family friends of ours whom I have known since I was 5. Not only was it my mom’s dream school, but one of my best friend’s older sisters graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2020 and has been working in film production since. Because of her education, her family had been Trojans for the past several years. It was her mom who called mine and asked about what I wanted to do for college. After telling her my interest in schools in the Bay Area, her mother said, “Nuh uh, Keilani has to go to USC!”
After deciding that pursuing a viola performance degree was not practical, simply because I did not have the time and/or energy to make an audition portfolio for submission, my recent interest in Computer Science and game development encouraged me to apply to the Viterbi School of Engineering instead as a CS major (especially since the application was much easier than the Thornton one). Months go by and all of my friends and family are continuously hyping me up with the assurance that I will go to USC due to my good grades, involvements, etc. Spring comes along during the height of college admissions season. Imagine my surprise when I had received the admission email on a Friday in late March telling me of my rejection.
It was not all bad because I had made the decision to transfer to Viterbi after a year of college, which is exactly what I did. I went to a small private school close to home for a year after high school, reapplied to Viterbi in February, submitted my application at 3:00 a.m. on the deadline, and got accepted. I had known that no matter what, because of my goals, ambitions, and niche hybrids of interests involving music and tech, I had to end up at USC somehow as they offered all of those things and more, and my attendance here so far has reinforced that notion.
