Who goes there, and what it does to them

A seventeen-year-old in Al Ain has three university offers and a family with an opinion about each of them.

One campus is beautiful. One is where her cousin studied. One is in another country, and that alone makes it feel important. Her friends have views. The fees are very different. The student who showed her around one of them was funny, and she has noticed that this is doing more work in her head than it should.

When a choice is this large and this unfamiliar, small reasons rush in to fill the space. They are easy to feel and easy to say out loud. Most of them will matter for about a month.

There is a simpler way to decide, and it works for a job, a neighbourhood or a circle of friends as well as a university. It comes down to two questions.

First, does this place draw the people she wants to be around, and slowly come to resemble?

Second, does the way the place runs, its pressures, its habits, what it rewards, push those inside it towards becoming that person?

Everything else on her list only matters if it changes one of those two answers. The handsome buildings, the cousin, the faraway flag: noise, unless they are the reason the right people come and stay.

Once the two questions are answered, the cheapest option that still passes both is the right one. Paying more for the same people and the same pull buys nothing at all.

It feels like a decision about who she is at seventeen. It is really a decision about who she will be at twenty-five.