It sits at the back of the least-populated hallway in the building. To the unsuspecting observer, it seems rather unassuming, with its plain red door labeled “Ms. Jefferson, Room 309” and cream plastered, still undecorated outside wall. But inside this small, cramped room, something incredible takes place.

When I walk in the room, my heart starts racing. I sit down at the circle of tables in the center and wait for the other students to arrive. I have spent the last week staying up until 2 a.m. scouring books and websites for information, each night spent enraptured by my semester-long project, this time on the new field of synthetic biology. My conclusions are starting to make sense, my paper beginning to take shape.

Each day, a few dozen students do just the same; they flow into and out of the room, and with them come the contents of their minds and curiosities. From their studies, they collect their ideas to form a cohesive whole; they create a place where everything is interconnected, where no two projects are so different that they do not share some common ground. Here is where the students collect and collaborate. Here is where their intellectual journey can truly begin.

I have experienced this room and the sanctuary it provides, but the endless hours I spend inside it are never enough, the conversations had and research done never sufficient to feed my hunger for pushing boundaries. I want to live inside a place like this. I want to come into contact with new people, new theories, new questions, and new answers. I want to be part of a community that is dedicated to moving the world forward. I crave this room and all rooms like it, and I envision a city of a thousand rooms, each just like this one, but each, too, unique, individual, and rare.

This place exists.

It exists in Hyde Park, in the south half of my favorite city, at a campus where each building, each park, each college house, is overflowing with the kind of people who I have met in Room 309. But, instead of only a few dozen, there are over 15,000 - undergraduates and professors alike sharing in a common pursuit: that of new ideas; that of fearless inquiry. 

Of course, I am also excited about UChicago for the obvious reasons: to study under its unique interdisciplinary core curriculum, to live in a diverse and welcoming college house, to learn from professors who are dedicated to their students, and to do research in unmatched facilities with unmatched faculty. I can envision myself carrying out diligent lab work on molecular biology for professor Navneet Bhasin's course “Biotechnology for the 21st century”, or discussing the effects of plastic waste on rural communities with Dr. Sabina Shaikh as part of the Program on the Global Environment. It is clear that the University of Chicago will provide me with the classes, professors, and opportunities that I will need to flourish intellectually. But, I cannot possibly know precisely which of the thousands of opportunities I will take advantage of, or which of the hundreds of renowned faculty I will learn from. I cannot know exactly what the University of Chicago community is like or how it will affect me years from now. But what I do know, and what I find most important and most distinctive about UChicago, is that it will provide a community of learners unlike any other. 

An unnamed University of Chicago professor said it best with the words, “Ours is the university of fearless inquiry. Ours is the university that develops ideas that change the world. Venturing into the unknown; that’s what it’s about.” I am dedicated to do the same. I will join UChicago in the quest to combine disciplines and do things never yet done before. I will continue the projects I have started and start new ones I cannot yet imagine. I will travel to new places, carry out new research, and be exposed to new ideas.

For, the university, as I know it, is not just a pile of adjectives slapped on an admissions flyer or a set of photos posted to a website; it is a living, breathing community, an ever-changing populace of scholars, of thinkers, of doers. It is an institution of pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo. It is a place where with each door I enter, just like in Room 309, I will be thrown into a whole new world of ideas and intellectual pursuits.

This is what I have been waiting for.