I had heard “Fight On” long before I ever visited USC.
It was catchy. Iconic. Easy to recognize.
But it didn’t mean anything to me yet.
That changed the first time I walked through campus. Not because of how USC looked, but because of how USC felt.
What stood out to me was this: USC didn’t feel like a place where everyone had the same definition of success. It felt like a place where people were allowed to grow in completely different directions, and somehow, all of those directions were valid.
I didn’t see polished, perfect students pretending they had everything figured out. I saw people who were actually curious. People who were trying things, switching paths, exploring ideas, experimenting, questioning, building. People who weren’t scared to admit they were still learning.
Because I’ve never been someone who fits neatly into a single lane. I’m the person who wants to understand how a servo moves on a hardware level and why a machine learning model behaves the way it does. I like writing low-level code one week and training an AI model on the software side the next.
USC was the first place where my combination of interests didn’t make me feel scattered, it made me feel seen.
But the moment that shaped my decision the most wasn’t academic.
It was noticing how USC students talked to each other.
There’s a certain generosity in the way people share information here, not to compete, not to impress, but because they genuinely want the person next to them to succeed. I watched students explain concepts to each other with patience and respect. I saw people collaborate even when they weren’t on the same team. I heard conversations that weren’t about grades or rankings, but about actual goals and ideas.
USC didn’t feel like a school where you try to outrun everyone. It felt like a place where everyone is running toward something big for themselves.
And that’s when “Fight On” made sense to me.
It wasn’t about pushing through stress for the sake of it. It wasn’t about pretending to be okay. It wasn’t about competing until you burn out.
It was about momentum. Curiosity. Even when things are uncertain, even when you’re experimenting, even when you’re building something that might not work yet.
And honestly, that mindset ended up shaping my USC experience more than I expected. I landed my first research position here, built an AI model for a hackathon and somehow won first place, and even started my own club, Launch AI. None of that came from having some perfect plan, it came from being in a place where people say “go for it” more often than they say “wait until you’re ready.”
USC is the place that made me excited about my future, not because it promised a straight path, but because it gave me a place to figure it out with people who think like me, build like me, and share the kind of mindset I want to grow into.
That’s why I chose USC.
Because “Fight On” finally felt like something I could live, not just something I could say.
