Explore USC: Day 3 - The Interview

     

I took no pictures on this day, so here's a random photo of the School of Cinematic Arts.

So, my relationship with sleeping had not been fixed during the previous day, as it turned out, which is most probably why I woke up at 5 a.m., once again. And, unlike at the hotel, there was not much I could do while lying on the floor of a dark dorm room with my roommate asleep, which made this early-waking up thing a bit less bearable. In hindsight, though, maybe this is what California does to me. Maybe I'll turn out to be a morning-person there, and wake up at 6 a.m. every day! Or maybe I was simply nervous about the interview, and my subconscious decided that I need to wake up early so that I can read through my application essay once again. Which was what I ended up doing.

4 pages of post-modern blabber and obscure French films, followed by a trip to the communal showers, and lots of pre-interview anxiety. Also, bad breakfast choices. That pretty much describes my last morning in LA. 

After that, however, was my time to shine. Megan had a review session, thus I couldn't keep my luggage in her room, so the two of us - me in full-on business attire - took off to the SCA building, dragging my roll alongs behind us. So fun. There, I said goodbye to Megan (sad) and was greeted by two people (can't remember names, I think one of them was an associate professor, sorry...) who already knew my name!!! For real! They also had a guy called Hans (shoutout to Hans!), who was just so, so, so nice to me, talk to me about the interview and answer my last questions etc. But more on him later, because before we could talk too much it was time to start the...

INTERVIEW. The whole reason for me being there. The 20 minutes that decide my fate. An interview that either guarantees my place at USC, or shatters my entire world. I'm not even being over-dramatic, I still shudder when I think about how much was at stake. And how little I perceived of it. Seriously, there were supposed to be three people interviewing me (a professor, a faculty member & a current student) but instead I got the Chair of the department, which was intimidating in itself, but then he began having a casual conversation with me, trying to persuade ME to attend (!!). I mean, I was preparing for a doctoral defense, I was preparing to defend every sentence of my application essay, and instead we had a casual conversation. Which, don't get me wrong, was extremely informative and enjoyable, but I didn't know where to put it...It was one of the best conversations I've ever had, but it didn't feel like an interview at all. 

I don't really want to get into details, but we even finished five minutes late and it didn't feel so long at all. It felt like 15 minutes at most. And outside, Hans was waiting for me, and the guy working there was joking around with me, and I instantly felt like I already belong there. I just wanted to stay. Send someone else home with my ticket. I'm sure many people would have been happy with a flight ticket to Europe. 

Unfortunately, however, that was not the case. I had to leave SCA, and I couldn't even wait for the fancy lunch they had for Explore students, as my shuttle picked me up at 12:20 p.m. Hans took me to California Pizza Kitchen, we had another great conversation, he promised to take me to Disneyland, took me to Entrance 2 and left for class. And there I was, waiting for Prime Time Shuttle, majorly freaking out once it didn't arrive on time, and crying and crying and crying on the inside.

I spent more than 2 hours at LAX, shopping and looking around. My flight home was with Air France, who have USB ports on their planes, and leather headphones, and better films than KLM (I started watching The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but fell asleep), but crazily uncomfortable seats. Also, the French business executive next to me also happened to be playing - wait for it - Candy Crush. Congratulations.

I could tell you about the rest of my journey home, but it was less exciting. Remember my trip to Paris I still didn't publish the post on? Well, I waited for my connection at the exact same terminal as back then. It was also at Aéroport Charles de Gaulle that I found out I got accepted to Kenyon College. YAY! There was a Hungarian couple next to me on my way to Budapest, who were coming home from Mexico and had a gigantic sombrero that was too big to fit into the overhead compartment. On my way home with the shuttle, I met a German medical student named Max, who was also really - wait for it - amazing. I have a small vocabulary of positive adjectives. The moment I got home, I told my mom that I hated being back in cold and depressing Hungary. She understood.

I still stand by that. I hate being back home. Explore USC was perfect.

Explore USC: Day 2 - Finally at USC!

Obligatory photo with Tommy Trojan.

After waking up for approximately the fifth time, and still finding that the digits on the iHome begin with 03, I decided to give up sleep for the day. It was clearly not working out. Instead, I had the marvelous idea to watch British YouTubers vlog at Venice Beach. In light of the previous day's events - not a great idea. Anyway, watching vlogs, staring at the parking structure outside my room and reading through the spring class schedule at USC somehow managed to take away 4 hours of my life, so soon enough it was 7 a.m. and time to get up.

My plan was to check out from the Radisson at 9, and arrive on campus by 9:30, which was the time the registration was set to begin. Ahem, I'm not too great with getting ready in the morning (mostly due to my eternal dissatisfaction with my hair, which I happened cut by 9 inches 2 days earlier) and I also forgot to hang my overpriced breakfast selection on the door, which left me with nothing but a Neapolitan wafer bar I'd brought from back home, but other than that I was all good, and ready to go.

After looking through the drawers three times and taking five pictures of every single piece of furniture, I finally took off, down to the reception, got my $100 deposit back, and off I was to USC. That's right, I was about to step onto the campus I had been dreaming about for the past five years. And it was intimidating.

It was intimidating, but also incredibly beautiful. All those buildings I saw in pictures - the Von Kleinsmid Center, the Doheny Library, but even Birnkrant Residence Hall - materialized in front of me, and instead of being underwhelming the way I thought they would me, they all managed to blow me away. I mean, we all think promotional photos and glossy brochures are filled with color-corrected, over-edited photos that have the pure intent of luring people in, but that's not the case with USC. The University of Southern California is even more stunning in real life.

Honestly, I almost got lost, since I was so busy looking around campus that I probably missed about three of the arrows saying EXPLORE that were supposed to lead me to check in. But I somehow got there anyway, and was greeted by an incredibly friendly & enthusiastic (this just about describes everyone I met) Theater major girl, who took my luggage and led me to check in, where I was given a free T-Shirt, a name tag and a folder that completely singled me out as an Explore student, but contained the campus map and program so necessary for the day. They also paired me up with a girl called Joanne, as we were both there on our own.

I have no idea what that Xxii was doing there...

The first program we took part in was the campus tour, the best part of which was our tour guide, Maddy, walking backwards. Anyway, she basically told us how back in 1880, USC had one building (now Alumni House), and the rest was all mustard fields, but then the university gradually started growing, and now it's midst one of its biggest ever projects, University Village. She also told us about the rivalry between Anna Bing and Eileen Norris and the inverted fountain resulting from it, the USC Instagram spot, and about the one person who actually joined the other tour group when the opportunity was given. And about a lot more, of course, but I won't spoil it for you - after all, who knows, you might end up visiting me there one day!

Next up was the USC Bookstore, which Joanne and I visited with two other girls - another Joanne and Alyssa. The bookstore, well...it's full of USC merch. Seriously, not just baseball caps and T-Shirts, but fuzzy socks and bobblehead dolls and bamboo salad tongs, and - as a prospective Trojan - I was inclined to buy all of it, even after seeing the hefty price tags. Yet it is in these moments that I appreciate my indecisiveness, thankfully, so I ended up leaving with nothing more than a key chain and kitchen magnet. And I feel like I made the right decision.

Following our bookstore adventure, we took part in a neighborhood bus tour, in one of those cool USC buses...

...with the coolest tour guide in the world, who berated everyone who had never been to In-N-Out Burger before - me included - and basically only talked about food. Well, mostly at least. Anyway, I couldn't really get that much out of the bus tour, but if I had to pick my favorite part of the 'hood, I'd pick the Greek Row. It was like a scene out of the movies...

After the tour, we had an hour to eat, so we decided to go to this "hidden gem" restaurant on campus, called Lemonade (it's actually a chain, but I didn't know that back then...). Erm, I guess the admission counselor guy we'd asked told all the Explore students about his secret place to eat, because by the time we arrived, Lemonade seemed not so hidden. And most people there wore name tags and were carrying folders around. Aside from that, though, food at Lemonade was perfect. I also tried red velvet cakes (you know who you are, thank you for the suggestion!), which I've been trying to find ever since in Hungary. So far, I have failed.

This is where USC students eat. For real.

Lunch was followed a Thematic Option presentation, which is basically a reading and writing heavy honors alternative to the general education curriculum. I, personally, have decided to apply and am struggling with the application questions ever since ("What do you feel ambivalent about?"), but Joanne virtually ran out after hearing the words "reading" and "writing" so many times. The guy giving the presentation was pretty funny, though ("Ask a question! Any question! Even what USC stands for!" or "That's why the graduate employment rate is so high here! USC just hires everyone after commencement!")

And now comes the best part...the Welcome Presentation, held at the Bovard Auditorium! I'm going to summarize it in bullet points:

• Kirk Brennan, the Director of Admissions, is the best. And he's a pretty avid Twitter user.
• Miloni Gandhi, the Associate Director of Admissions who admitted me, welcomed me personally on stage, and I even had the chance to wave at her & she waved back and it was perfect.
• In the application, we had to describe ourselves in three words. Here are some examples: worthy, of, admission; "very weird" as one word; "quirky", written about 50 times (for the record, I think one of my words was "scripturient")
• Best invention, according to two admitted students: the Common Application *facepalm* (I put the toothbrush, though, so I'm not judging)
• SURPRISE PERFORMANCE BY THE TROJAN MARCHING BAND!!! And the admission committee just started dancing out of the blue! And we all had to hold up the victory sign. And everyone check out the marching band!

The Kids Aren't Alright

This will be a little anticlimactic now, but after the Welcome Presentation, the four other School of Cinematic Arts students and I went to our school-specific presentation, where we toured all (well, a lot) of the film school. We saw a Foley room, a sound stage, many screening rooms, old cameras and hundreds of signed film posters. We also got another gift bag, and an SCA T-Shirt that I wore on my first day back at school. There was also a video introduction and a student panel, and I loved every moment of it.

When this was done, I was matched up with my host, Megan (shoutout to Megan!), who has the best shoe collection in the world and is also a Critical Studies major. We then got my luggage, dragged it across campus, went up to her dorm room, then went on another tour around campus (the fountains! the fountains!). Oh, and we also had dinner at the main dining hall in between, and I had a milkshake (called Chocolate Sunscreen) at Ground Zero, an amazing performance café with live music. And I also met lots and lots of people and had an amazing time, and proceeded to fall asleep at 8 p.m.

So many fountains.

The Traveler, USC's official mascot.

Random campus photo.

The rest of the night is vague...Megan went to the library, I slept on the floor in my sleeping bag, I began re-reading my application and realized that I forgot everything I knew about post-modernism, and...and...

TO BE CONTINUED

Explore USC: Day 1 - The Flight, the Hotel, and the Failed Quest to Buy a TAP Card

A photo I took in the shuttle that has nothing to do with this post.

On Wednesday, February 25th, at 2:30 a.m. precisely, a choir of alarm clocks went off in the southern suburbs of Budapest. One after the other, their soft but determined melodies merged into a terrible, buzzing cacophony, and the 18-year-old girl sleeping within striking distance was awoken, reluctantly crawling out of her bed.

Yeah. Basically, I set four alarm clocks just to make sure I didn't miss my flight to LA. Which leads me to...

The news is correct, I have been admitted to the University of Southern California!!!! For real!!! And yes, I know I'm delivering this in a pretty underwhelming way - considering how this is all I've ever wanted - but I promise to write the most enthusiastic post you've ever seen when or if I decide to attend. Because again yes, I have been nominated for a full-tuition scholarship, but the key is the word nominated, and I had to attend an interview that decides my fate  whether I get the money or not. And it was also this interview that ultimately drove me to LA, to this two day program called Explore USC.

 

My acceptance packages that are all over Instagram and Twitter

So, now that we've cleared all that up: the flight. Deciding that one connection was more than enough, I purchased a ticket to LA that was a tiny bit on the expensive side, but only had one occasion of changing planes, at Amsterdam Schiphol. The plane left at 6:30 a.m., so I had the airport shuttle pick me up at 4:00 a.m. - just in case - and I was already at the Budapest Airport by five. I had quite a lot of time left to linger around in duty free, which I spent by aggressively trying to find a WiFi network and sending all my friends a photo of the airplane. Just to make them jealous, y'now.

When I could finally board at 6:05 a.m. (gotta let all those very important Business Class people in front of me, who lo and behold looked less business-y, and more I'm-going-on-vacation-to-Hawaii-hence-I'm-wearing-boardshorts-y) I happily took my well-deserved window seat, next to a slightly grumpy businessman (the tourists took his Business Class seat, no wonder he was upset...) and a guy who enjoyed eating his sandwich more than I thought it was possible for an average human being, and concluded that for once, I would have a peaceful flight. That is, until a family of four with two babies sat right behind me. Typical.

Despite that, as it is, the flight itself was pretty uneventful. I was either staring out of the window, taking pictures, and repeating the words "so cool", or trying to guess what important business deal the grumpy man was trying to negotiate on his iPad the entire time. He seemed pretty invested in it, so I was devastated to find out by the end of the flight that what I thought were the terms a million dollar contract, was in fact Candy Crush. I even shed a tear. But at least by the end of the flight all his grumpiness dissipated and he started playing with the baby behind us, so that's an achievement. We even had a sweet little conversation at Schiphol, which - after spending nearly 45 minutes trying to cross it and almost missing my flight -  I affectionately named the Russia of airports. (Because of its size, get it...)

Half of the pictures I took were taken from the airplane. Just saying.

Now, KLM flight KL1972 from Budapest to Amsterdam is a friendly little plane, if you get what I mean, so when I spotted the gigantic intercontinental Titanic-sized beast that would transport me across the ocean, I did do a double take. Or quadruple. What's even worse that the queue waiting to board was basically longer than an entire moving walkway. I mean, forget businessmen and babies and reserved European passengers, people on this plane were everything from rodeo cowboys to valley girls. Sh*t was getting real.

So, when I booked my seat for this flight, I had two options: book one in the middle row, next to the toilets, or pay 40 Euros for one next to the window (the "Preferred Seat"). I went with the latter one, which ended up providing the perfect opportunity for my seatmate Paschal ("Like the unit of pressure?" "Yes. Thanks for calling me the unit of pressure.") to mock me. In a friendly way, anyway. But more on him in a second. See, the window seat certainly gave a nice view, but it also enclosed me in a sort of bubble from which I couldn't hear a thing, meaning that I couldn't watch a single film (the awful earphones they gave didn't help) and that poor Paschal had to yell at me so that I could hear him. Anyway, back to him: Paschal was a really cool guy from Virginia, who had an affinity for Dracula and tap water, and had spent a couple of months in Russia. He also told me how people in New Orleans with face tattoos get disability benefits, but I've searched online and sadly found no evidence of this being true. So Paschal and I had a lovely, lovely time during this 11-hour flight, dissing airplane food (He got the vegetarian food. I got the vegetarian pasta. There is a difference.), dissing World Business Class passengers, and noticing how the guy next to us was either snoring or downing shots at the bar. And noticing how KLM flights were dominated by male flight attendants (Air France too, as I found out on my way home. And I mean seriously, this was one of the few job positions with a predominantly female presence! My inner feminist is rising!) And noticing how they gave us more food than I usually eat in a week.

This might be Greenland. Or maybe Canada.

Enough about the flights, though! At 11:40 a.m. Los Angeles time (which is 8:40 p.m.  normal Budapest time) I began spotting palm trees. I began spotting snaking highways. I began spotting identical-looking houses - naturally all of them having swimming pools. We were in LA. At 11:45 a.m., we landed at LAX. (And, for the record, no, Miley Cyrus, I didn't just "hop off the plane at LAX". Getting off that plane was a struggle for survival.)

Border control was also a struggle for survival, as the lady there pretty much outright accused me of being an illegal immigrant and attempting to invade her country. And yes, I know it's her job to intimidate me et al, but I can't possibly comprehend why out of all people, she thought a girl with milkmaid braids and a stuffed animal in her hand would threaten US security. But then again, this is border control and I guess you just suck it up and try not to act sketchy. And I ended up being admitted, so all good.

And it's only now that I realize how much I've written, so let's speed up events. Basically, boyfriend Shane was supposed to pick me up at the airport, but he missed his flight from Colorado (verbatim, "I might not be in LA that early, babe, but I'll pick you up. I'll call you after take-off".) Now, kind of counting on him not making it, I asked one of my friends' boyfriend to pick me up as well, just in case, but he thought I was arriving at midnight  not at noon, so he couldn't make it either, and then I called about 5 of my other friends in LA, none of whom were in town, which made me seriously consider whether my arrival in the US was making everyone I know run like a jet stream from the city. Probably.

 

 The Theme Building, which you've seen in all LA tour books

This is LA. 

Yet this revelation didn't help me too much, so I dragged my luggage to the nearest Prime Time Shuttle station, payed $15 and arrived at the Radisson Hotel at USC within 40 minutes. I mean, who needs friends when you have cheap red vans and underpaid drivers? It was a bit early for me to check-in, so I dropped off my luggage and used the free hotel WiFi to send all my friends pictures of the LA palm trees. Just to notify them of my safe arrival. And of course to make them jealous.

My room at the Radisson was pretty cool. Except for my view. That was a parking structure.

After getting 45 questions on whether I was jet-lagged, and answering "No, not at all, jet-lag doesn't work on me" 45 times, I went on a quest to find the nearest Expo station and buy a TAP card (LA version of an Oyster card or whatever they call it where you live, unless you're Hungarian, because then you get an ugly piece of purple paper that no longer fits into your pass case). Needless to say, despite having a printed map and asking 5 different people, I failed miserably. On top of all that, by the time I got my room keys and took a shower, it was already 4 p.m., and since I didn't want to get back in the dark and the trip to Venice Beach would have taken 4 hours total, I had to cut that program from my schedule. Yep. Deep disappointment. No artsy pics of roller coasters and Ferris wheels for Layra.

Instead, I put my pajamas on, switched on the TV and tried to find Trojan Visions (the USC TV channel), failed at that too, hung the "DO NOT DISTURB" sign on the doorknob, set my four alarm clocks, and fell asleep at 5 p.m.. Day over.

(When I woke up, I was fresh and ready to start the next day. I glanced at the clock and it was only 7 p.m. Maybe I was jet-lagged, after all.)

TO BE CONTINUED WITH DAY 2. 
It won't be this long. I promise. Or not.