These past few months have not been easy, but something I’ve really come to appreciate are my friendships.  Throughout all the moments of emotional anxiety and heightened neuroticism that I’ve displayed, my friends have been nothing but loving, encouraging, and gracious.  I really don’t know what I’d do without them.

Out of their care & concern, my friends spent a full night of this past week dedicated to my upcoming decision. One of my more “mathematical” friends decided we should, in true consulting fashion, lay out all the different factors that could potentially affect my decision and rank/score them for each school.  I was reluctant at first, especially considering I’m someone who makes decisions based on my gut and thought such an exercise would be futile.  I argued that this might just be like that one Friends episode where Ross was making a pro/cons list on Rachel vs Julie, and his “not Rachem” factor outweighed all others.  But my friends insisted that even if this exercise will help me come to my “not Rachem” epiphany, it’ll still be helpful regardless.

So I obliged (whiteboard, spreadsheets, & all) and it was admittedly very helpful to be able to sort out my thoughts and concerns. And though I didn’t land on a conclusion (quite yet), I think delineating all these considerations helped me figure out what factors were most important to me and physically seeing the computed scores helped me see things more clearly.  Maybe I’m more of a numbers girl than I thought?