On Staying in Los Angeles for College

by Emily Quintanilla ‘24

As someone who grew up in Los Angeles, I was hesitant to go to college in my hometown. When I was accepted to USC, I was excited but had one major concern: I didn’t expect the experience to change me very much. What would I experience in the next four years that I hadn’t already? However, from the beginning, my college experience has been extremely unconventional.

For starters, my first year of college was entirely online. I, like most of the class of 2024, spent freshman year experiencing college through my tiny laptop screen. Since my last few months of high school were also held online, my first year of college felt strangely familiar. Nothing changed except new faces in the Zoom room.

In my second year, since I was so close to home, I decided to commute instead of living on-campus. The shift from online to in-person classes made me realize college wasn’t like high school at all. While I was still in the same big, diverse city I had always lived in, USC had many things my high school didn’t have: it was bigger (20,000 undergrads compared to my high school’s total population of 500), it had a football team and school spirit, and it had more classes that would allow me to explore different passions. Oddly, an image from Beautiful Boy­­—the 2019 movie starring Timothee Chalamet filmed on USC’s campus—stays in my head and encapsulates how I viewed USC. Chalamet reads poetry by Charles Bukowski in a lecture hall, skateboards down Trousdale with a grin on his face, and lounges in Founder’s Park with cinematic gold light surrounding him. These images embodied what I thought college here would be: romantic, intellectual, and inviting.

However, I struggled with feeling like an outsider these first two years. I remember attending Convocation and watching other students take pictures with their new roommates and friends. I still only talked to my high school friends and my roommates were my parents, so I stood by myself on the sidelines. I also remember my first creative writing classes where my pieces were constantly picked apart by professors, a big change from the consistent praise I received in high school. I remained in awe of my peers who could effortlessly produce high quality pieces of work while balancing their already busy social lives. I felt like I didn’t belong at USC—being familiar with the area surrounding the school didn’t give me an upper hand in navigating the unique challenges USC would pose.

In junior year, I finally decided to get an apartment close to campus. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I felt like I had granted myself a fresh start—in college and in life. While I had always lived in LA, I had never lived in the city away from my family. This was a huge life change, and navigating this new experience helped me realize that a lot of growth happens when you’re on your own. Since a lot of my prior experiences with USC was connected to my parents—when my parents moved to the United States from Central America, they both found new homes in South Central—experiencing LA separate from them was a transformative experience in itself.  

I had more freedom and time to put myself out there and make my own memories here. I began college shy and intimidated, but when I fully committed to being a college student, the community embraced me with open arms. Through clubs, like Helenes, or work or classes, I got to collaborate with the people I had admired all this time: the driven and hard-working students who had already inspired me so much. Once I got to know them personally (and I'm so grateful that some of them became great, great friends), their ambition and passion rubbed off on me. 

At USC, I didn’t expect to find so much inspiration from the community and the people, and I don’t think I would’ve turned out the same if I hadn’t gone to this school. Yes, I stayed in my Los Angeles, but new memories—Saturday football games, gossiping with my roommates over Pot of Cha, solo dates to new parts of LA—helped me find a new version of myself without ever leaving home.

Living on-campus pushed me to experience college as fully as possible, and I realized then that you don’t have to leave your hometown to grow; college itself is a new experience full of enough challenges to transform a person.

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