Jump on the Bus to USD

So it’s almost that time for acceptance letters to come out. I’m sure you are all anxious to find out about all the schools you got into and hopefully USD is one of them. The most important thing to remember is that wait listed ≠ (does not equal) rejected. I was wait listed at USD and was not planning on going to college unless I got into USD. I was planning on working for a year full-time until about May 20th, when I received a phone call from a USD admissions counselor saying I had made it off the wait list and been accepted to USD. There were no words to describe the excitement I felt; sure my parents were not as excited as I was because they wanted me to stay close to home and tried to hold me back. But there was no holding me back, I knew the right place for me to go was USD and no one else but me could make the decision of where I should go to college but myself. So if you know USD is the right place for you, do what I did and hop on the bus to USD. So you might wonder what made USD the right place for me, well first of all I wanted to get away. College is a once in a lifetime opportunity to live in a completely different part of the United States or even the world, and you need to take advantage of that opportunity. College is a great way to meet new people and network (which is how you will most likely get your first internship). So this is what USD had to offer for me: distance from home so I wasn’t tempted to go home every weekend, tons of new people I had never met before, and opportunities for internships in San Diego or anywhere in the country, not to mention the beautiful weather. It is hard going home for Christmas, leaving the warm sunny San Diego for the cold and snowy Northeast, but this is one problem in life I can deal with.

About Me

Hello everyone my name is Thomas Amarante. I hail from Wayne, New Jersey (about 15 minutes outside New York City) and I am currently enrolled in the University of San Diego as a second semester sophomore. I have an older brother who graduated from Brown University (’08) and is applying to medical school; and a sister who is graduating from Boston College this year (’09) and is going to work for Citi bank. Why go so far away to college you might ask; well the answer is simple, 2,500 miles from home, you learn to mature quickly at college. I am meeting people all over the world here at USD because their admission tries to be diverse as possible. Back home in New Jersey, high school was a breeze so I had to find some other activities to keep me occupied. I went to work as an auto mechanic and since my great-grandfather owned a dealership that my father worked at, I have always been around cars and always trying to gain more knowledge about them. I also became an EMT which requires about 120 hours of classes and a final exam to be certified by the state of New Jersey. I volunteer for Wayne Township Memorial First Aid Squad in NJ. Not only are we an ambulance squad, we are a rescue squad, which means we carry tools for extrication. And last summer I got an internship with a sailboat manufacturer called LaserPerformance. You might wonder why they picked me for the internship; well I race the sailboats they manufacture, competitively in the summer and have met many different representatives of this company over time. The summer internship included traveling to all the events in the summer with charter boats the company rents out. It is my job to make sure they get transported safely and securely to each event. That’s me in short. If you have any questions or suggestions for me, please email me and let me know! Thanks, Thomas!!