Every year at this time, we show off our stripes as proud members of the Wesleyan community, eager to show prospective students that our university deserves to be their top choice. We show off our accomplishments, our virtues, our benefits, and our positive attributes. There is far more to our university than meets the eye, and I want to share why I think students should actually want to attend Wesleyan.

I come from Princeton, N.J., which, as many of you know, is home to one of the best universities in the entire world: Princeton University. I didn’t apply to Princeton; I applied to Wesleyan. Wesleyan, like all educational institutions, is flawed, but I think that of all the institutions I know, it has the most potential to be changed by its students for the better. I am not speaking as a naïve, privileged liberal arts student; I am speaking as a person who applied to Wesleyan because of its history as an activist institution where students have demanded a voice.

I have seen that voice swell in recent years, as students have challenged the University on its decision to end its need-blind admissions policy. I have watched as students have successfully pushed sustainability initiatives that have forced the University to consider its impact on the environment. I have listened as people have demanded better communication when it comes to law enforcement and race relations. I have sat in classrooms where people have dared to question their own perspectives and dared to consider the possibility that everything they have accepted as fact since grade school may be false and cannot be taken for granted without thorough examination. Even though I am a stubborn optimist, I had grown disillusioned with the ingrained culture that victimizes survivors of abuse. However, recently I have seen people on campus transform into an army of angry friends who want to peer pressure would-be perpetrators of sexual violence into preventing crimes rather than committing them.

We are true fighters at this University; not only do we have a fight song, but we have people who are willing to scream from atop tables and take to the streets to fight for what we believe in. We fight with words, with research, with nonviolent tactics, with passion, with art, with bodies, with patience, and yes, sometimes even with the administration. We fight for funding, recognition, peace, irony, understanding, and the right to be whoever we are, however we are, and to let others be, too.

No, we are not perfect, and we are still working things out; we don’t know what jobs we’ll have once we graduate or whether what we say will have an impact. But everyone I’ve met here has a powerful backstory and a great future, and I am proud to be on the same campus as them. We each choose our path and our means of education; not all of us choose college as a step in our growth process. But for those of us who chose Wesleyan, we know why we chose it and why we want to change it for the better. Let’s get real here and acknowledge what can and should be improved and the fact that we Cardinals have a damn good chance of improving our school if we work at it.