By Chloe Baker, Senior Opinions Editor
My first ever article for the YU Observer was full of lies.
I don’t mean that in a dramatic way. On the surface level, everything I wrote was technically true. I was indecisive about where I wanted to go to college. I did spend months asking myself the question “what do you really want?” It is true that I can’t speak highly enough of my first-year orientation. And the second I arrived on campus, Dean Shoshana Schechter greeted me with a smile that made me feel, at least for a moment, like I had made the right choice.
But when I wrote that “the transition from seminary to college has so far been very smooth” — that was the lie. A well-intentioned one, potentially. Looking back, I think that article was less a piece of writing for others and more an act of self-persuasion. I was trying to convince myself, publicly, that I was happy here. But I wasn’t. Not yet, at least.
For months, the problem wasn’t Stern. The problem was me. I didn’t really want to be here. Stern was my next best option, second to what I actually wanted, which was to stay in Israel. I was mourning something I so badly wanted, but couldn’t have. I was picturing a life that was out of reach, while standing in the middle of the one I was already living.
It wasn’t until right before Pesach of my first year that something shifted. I had finally found my footing — my rhythm, my people, my place, — and then it was time to leave for two weeks. It was bittersweet in the most clarifying way, because the fact that I didn’t want to leave told me everything I needed to know.
So, I made the decision to stop imagining a life that didn’t exist and instead start properly living the one in front of me.
And what I found was nothing like what I had advertised in that first article.
I came to Stern expecting the Torah-secular balance to be the defining feature of my experience. I wrote about it enthusiastically in that first article, full of hope for shiurim (Torah classes) and chavrusas (learning partners) and a life where both worlds – Torah U’Madda – coexisted equally. And while that environment exists and I’m grateful for it, it wasn’t what changed me. What did change me were the things I never thought to anticipate.
It was first and foremost the people, the friends I could not have met anywhere else in the Jewish world. It’s the fact that at Stern we have a student body so diverse that someone who grew up in a Bais Yaakov setting can sit across from someone who doesn’t observe Shabbat, all of us at the same Shabbat table talking and laughing. It is the fact that you can meet some of the most unique and incredible people at this institution. I think about the life I had initially wanted for myself, and realize I would never have met and known these people if that’s where I had ended up. That alone makes coming here worth it.
It is also the sense of community I found in unexpected corners. In the political science department, at the YU Observer, on my floors as a Resident Advisor (RA), in the ResLife office and among my fellow RAs, with the small group of Chabad girls who attended Chassidus shiurim and with the girls in the Mechina program. It was hosting Friday night dinners in my apartment and the experience of Shabbat in New York City. It was learning to take the subway alone and realizing, somewhere between uptown and downtown, that I had become someone much more capable and independent than I thought I could be.
It was professors who became mentors. Administrators who knew my name. An education that didn’t just prepare me for stability but genuinely enriched my life in ways I’m still discovering.
None of this is what I wrote about in that first article. All of it is better than I could have imagined.
Now, years later in my last piece for the YU Observer, I’m standing at a different — yet somewhat parallel — crossroads. Senior year, and especially graduation, does that to you. It strips away most of what you thought you knew before. It gets rid of the structure you have been accustomed to since preschool, and asks you again that same uncomfortable question: what do you really want? And just like four years ago, I find myself seeking guidance from people I trust, sitting with uncertainty and trying to make a decision from a place of strength, rather than fear. Those were my own words. Written by a version of myself who didn’t fully believe or understand them yet.
I believe and understand them now.
Not because the path forward is at all clear, but because I have seen and experienced what happens when you commit to the life in front of you even when it isn’t the one you planned. I’ve seen how expectations can be humbly exceeded by something realer and more surprising than anything you could have scripted. I’ve learned that the moments that truly shape you rarely announce themselves. Instead, they accumulate, like a mosaic, until one day you step back and see what they’ve created.
So to anyone else standing at an unfamiliar (yet so familiar — such is life) crossroads, unsure whether their choice is the right one: it might not be what you imagined. It might take longer than you expected to feel like home. But it has the potential to be something you could not have dreamed for yourself.
I spent so long asking myself, “What do you really want?” I never considered that the answer might find me before I found it.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Chloe Baker