When making an important life-altering decision, I like to pretend that all of my options were trapped on a desert island, engaged in a Battle Royale of theoretical proportions. It’s a methodology that has been passed down in the Scarselletta clan for generations; it’s how my sister decided to go blonde, and how my mother chose which children to keep.

So, while driving lost through the gray, pathetic-looking drudge that was the Veterinarian School in November of my junior year of high school, I took one look at the shrouded, backpacked figures emerging pale and study-worn from gray buildings, and I swore to my parents that I would never, ever attend Cornell University, the apparent runt of the Ivy League. I was lost in a daydream about Dartmouth, it’s mountain men made hardy from months of trapping, fishing and climbing mountains with their bare hands just to get to math class. That, I believed, was what a tough school was made of.

But my parents made me promise to return to the Big Red during that one week in May when enough seniors’ souls had been sold to financial companies to buy Cornell some good weather. Our first stop was Trillium.

As I walked through the doors that would later contribute to at least 11 of my freshman 15 and then some, I heard the growls of giant beings as they shuffled through their feeding area. Some laughed, some talked, most ate like the Christian Children’s fund at The Old Country Buffet. Someone had apparently coordinated their wardrobes, as they each were painted head to toe in gray sweats, Nike backpacks and protruding deltoids. And the males wore hats. I had fallen asleep and woken up in a dream … I had woken up where … where …

“Where the wild things are!” My mom said. I looked at her, confused.

“What?”

“I just remembered; I left that book at home,” she said.

A new respect for Cornell was growing in my head. In the winter, these gray-shrouded Cornellians were actually warriors battling the worst of the elements while shackled by books and the temptation to transfer. These women were soldiers of weather-inappropriate footwear, waving the flag of fashion as they ignored the fact that Uggs are in fact water absorbent. These men bore their burden of eight-month-per-year shrinkage, for the sole pursuit of higher education! This land was donated by farmers who found it too savage to grow brainless plant-life and decided to build a college instead.

This school, filled with athletic beasts, pasty nerds and somewhat alarming combinations of the two, was built much tougher than the high walls of Harvard or Princeton, who, by the way, have high walls in Cambridge and Princeton. (I believe to prevent the ruffians from surrounding high-end coffee shops from infiltrating their borders to steal their endowed J Crew catalogue collection.)

Cornell, with its corn-fed athletes thick from abusing meal plans that offer unlimited access to 78 percent fat chocolate milk, with its action-starved engineers and architects mobilized by years of library-repression, with its farmers who shoot dear with tranquilizers, abduct and run tests on them, and return them undamaged for fun, could handle any other Ivy in the Thunderdome.

So, I made my final, life-determining decision to come to Cornell after playing basketball and living at the N.Y. State fair for four days. After spending 96 hours discussing how to prevent milk-fat separation with diary princesses, and watching my look-I-pierced-my-own-tongue basketball teammate do pull-ups on the base of our mutual bunk bed, my mind was not at its clearest. In a frenzy to grasp at something other than farmers and athletes, I committed to Cornell. And God turned to Moses and said, “Get it? Get it? Oh, my me, I’m hilarious. See the irony?!” And Moses laughed haphazardly to appease the Lord.

Now, as I look into the face of my pending graduation, I see staring back at me the crazy eyes and tongue ring of my NYS Fair bunkmate. “But, why Cornell?” She asked me ominously when I returned from the phone call that sealed my fate. “Are you sure that’s what you wanted? Do you regret it?”

Four years, 160 grand, zero formal invites and 31 Facebook albums later (don’t judge), I feel compelled to ask myself the same question.

Would I still base my major on my professor’s wardrobe? The end of my sophomore year, my sole career aspiration consisted of owning a petting zoo of mini-pigs and mini-horses with mini-barns cleaned by mini-farmers, attached to a giant restaurant with giant chairs, silverware, tables and portions, waited by my giant friends. At this critical point in my career, I was asked to choose a major. And Philosophy professors have the cutest bowties.

I was once caught in an elevator with a Hotel professor and my tatted, cig-scented Philosophy professor. To my horror, the Hotel professor started lecturing on the dangers of cigarettes, and I watched my professor stab him mercilessly with witty, clever argument. The point? I might work at the post office, but I’ll still be awesome.

Would I still spend 30 plus hours a week training to fight a bear? As an athlete, the majority of my days were spent lifting the equivalent to DG’s pledge class, and my nights were spent trying to catch up on the homework I didn’t do while running just enough sprints that I didn’t die entirely, while my neck spasmed softly to the beat of Eye of the Tiger.

Igfiso hgiofhg hgiofhgio. That, my friends, was the sound of pounding my head against my keyboard — which, in a masochistic athlete, means absolutely. My commitment to Newman Nation built my character in a way unique to athletics. Have you ever been stuck in a small room with the kid you made out with last Saturday in a dark fraternity corner? Now add weights, pit stains, spandex and 50 other combinations of couples in the exact same situation. Welcome to the varsity weight lifting center. Remember squeezing two grown bodies into a dorm twin bed? Now add 40 - 50 pounds each. We athletes are the proud and unrelentingly enthusiastic proprietors of this brand of social misfortune fueled, and I believe sponsored, by Citogain — and I relished every quirk and calorie. While my spin move may become a moot talent post-graduation (until my toddlers are big enough to make fun of when I dunk in their faces), my ability to balance a steady diet of workouts, all nighters and humiliation will come in handy when I open my can of social catastrophe on the real world.

And would I still write for The Sun? Probably not, because the current Editor in Chief would most likely appear in a dream to the Editor in Chief that hired me and tell him, in a moment that collapses the hind/foresight distinction, that I’m garbage.