I have a confession to make: Cornell wasn’t my first choice. It wasn’t my second, or even my third. But after being rejected from the school of my dreams — I don’t want to toss out any names here, but let’s just say it was more Swarthy — and receiving a pittance of financial aid from a few other tiny “we put the liberal in liberal arts” bubble-schools, the Cornell College of Human Ecology’s (comparatively) reasonable in-state price tag was looking mighty nice.

With a reluctant sigh, I dropped my college decision postcards into the mailbox; declines were routed to sunnier climes, while my acceptance card climbed ever northward.

I didn’t want to go to Cornell primarily because of its size. Thirteen thousand undergrads seemed like an unfathomably large number, especially when stretched across a massive campus where it could easily take you half an hour to get to class. I had a feeling I would never get to know anybody at such a huge school; I would become a recluse, crouching in a corner of my dorm room with matted hair and tattered, grease-stained clothing, gnawing on a chicken bone.

On top of that, I’d heard all the requisite horror stories: The highest suicide rate of all colleges; the twitch-inducing workload; the eight-month arctic winters interspersed with four-month rainstorms; the red tape; the mysterious violation of physics that causes every destination, regardless of direction, to be uphill from where you are.

The end of August came all too quickly, and I found myself uprooted and replanted in the unfamiliar land of Ithaca. Over the course of the next nine months, I discovered that all of the aforementioned horror stories — with the exception of the suicide one, which is purely a myth — are more or less exactly true.

I’m telling you this not because I want you to wet yourselves, but because you should have already known that Cornell isn’t easy. You aren’t going to Cornell because you like slacking off, and you certainly aren’t going to Cornell for the mild winters (North Dakota residents excepted).

That much should be obvious; what’s slightly murkier is why, aside from the meaningless Ivy League cachet, you are going to Cornell. I had no idea why I was going, but with two years under my belt I can tell you.

Perhaps the greatest thing about Cornell — and they’ll never tell you this on the tour or in a “Welcome to Cornell!” brochure with happy multicultural students on the front — is that nearly everyone is used to being second-best.

I don’t know precisely what percentage of Cornell students were rejected by their first-choice school, but it’s definitely a majority. Most were rejected from Harvard, some from Princeton or MIT, and a handful of students are like me and wanted to go to a college whose entire campus could fit on Cornell’s Arts Quad.

But I soon discovered that Cornell’s generous size, which at first seemed daunting and impenetrable, is actually its saving grace. You see, Cornell, in its humbling vastness, can be whatever school you want it to be.

Enjoy sitting alone with a book and people-watching? Cornell has 20 libraries, each with its own ambience, and you can’t swing a cat without hitting a caf�. Prefer staying up all night with friends and drinking yourself into oblivion? Go Greek. Want to wake up early on Saturday mornings, don armor and hit people with wooden sticks? Join the Society of Creative Anachronisms, and you can do just that. Or perhaps you enjoy writing long-winded polemics and receiving hate mail; well, my friend, don’t be surprised if you find yourself writing for The Cornell Daily Sun in a couple of years.

You can take a class in just about every subject imaginable, and choose a major that students at smaller schools haven’t even heard of. You can learn Dutch and study abroad in Holland. You can learn Quechua and study abroad in whatever country still speaks Quechua. You can stay in Ithaca and take advantage of the seemingly infinite physical education classes — so far, I’ve learned how to belly dance and become certified for bowhunting in New York State (it’s hard to decide which of these skills will be more useful).

You can go to Cornell Cinema and watch a movie for five bucks. You can go to frat parties. You can go to free concerts on the weekends. You can go for a hike in the gorges. You can go to frat parties. You can go to hockey games and throw fish at the Harvard team. You can go to sorority parties … held at frats. You can eat at great restaurants, or nosh on some of the best dining hall food ever at Appel Commons. You can stay in and do work; at some point, you probably should.

You can, in short, do anything you want to do — but you have to try. In a smaller school you can’t help but be swept away in the undertow of your classmates. At Cornell, you can sit in your dorm room all day watching Who Wants to Marry My Dad? on your laptop and never interact with another human being.

It may be difficult to resist the urge to do exactly that, especially if you get here and you hate your classes and you hate the weather and you hate 90 percent of the people here.

But you’ll be missing out, because alongside the terrible professors are some really amazing ones, and Libe Slope is the perfect sledding hill when freshly coated with snow. And that other 10 percent? Will turn out to be the greatest people you’ll ever have the opportunity to meet.

You’ll hate a lot of things about Cornell, it’s true. The trick is to also find the things you love. Keep an open mind, and they’ll come easier than you think.

And for the love of God, bring a warm coat.