Congratulations to the high school seniors who have committed to coming to Syracuse. Some of you decided that Syracuse was your dream school a long time ago. Some of you will decide on May 1.

If you have decided, you probably want to know more about your new home. If you’re still figuring it out, let me convince you to come to the best school on the planet.

Syracuse is wonderfully located. It’s the right mix of urban and rural. You can enjoy the city, which is really just a couple restaurants among a sea of abandoned buildings, or you can go out into the backroads of Redneckville. We really have it all here.

In relation to the rest of the world, Syracuse is wonderfully located. It’s only a four-and-a-half-hour drive to New York City, Philadelphia or Toronto; a six-hour drive from Boston; a five-and-a-half-hour drive to Pittsburgh; or a six-and-a-half-hour drive to Washington, D.C. If you want to stay in New York state, you can get to Ithaca, Rochester and Buffalo from anywhere between one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half hours.

See, every city is easily accessible with a car — which you won’t have your freshman year.

Syracuse is so well administrated. We spend our money responsibly. We just bought a new heated promenade. It only cost $6 million, and it’s already giving back to the school with more walking space than the sidewalks we had before.

Getting involved on campus is very easy, accessible and fun. We have hundreds of registered student organizations and most are funded to be able to pay for activities, equipment, trips or whatever they need to succeed. Our Student Association, a government run by students of the university, is in charge of funding. We saw this year how clearly competent and trustworthy that group can be, and how they handle any issues that come up. They’ve learned everything to know about finances from the university.

You may have heard about Syracuse because of our famed sports programs. People love going to the football games, where it’s an astonishing season if we win more games than we lose. That doesn’t matter because games are exciting and it’s always great to watch big dudes hit each other in the biggest domed stadium in the nation, which is mostly empty.

But that’s no problem because we have a historically amazing basketball team. Last year they went to the Final Four, and this year they weren’t even one of the top 64 teams in the country.

Syracuse University is a private institution, and although that can be expensive, all the things you can take advantage of are endless. It’s certainly worth every penny. Or, you could just go to the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry school directly next door to us and get every single privilege we do and pay a fraction of the price.

When you’re a freshman, you’ll enjoy one of the wonderful dorms our campus has to offer. You’re assigned randomly, but you’ll always have a dining hall and gym nearby where you live. Plus, classes are usually less than a 10-minute walk. When you’re a sophomore, you have to fight with an arbitrarily random number lottery, which breaks up friends living with each other just to have one of those privileges you have as a freshman.

Generally, finding friends is easy because everybody is easygoing, passionate and drunk all of the time. Unless you don’t find any. Oh gosh, are you the kid on your freshman floor who transfers? There’s always one, isn’t there? Sorry it had to be you, but still come here anyway.

But, seriously, although our school has many flaws, we all still choose to put our families and ourselves in crippling debt for some reason. It’s because of the wonderful relationships you can foster with people who also bleed Orange. Syracuse University is the home to so many wonderful and different people, and the lifetime connections you’ll make here is more than worth it. Plus, chicken tender Thursdays.

Josh Feinblatt is a sophomore television, radio, film major. His number one reason for attending SU was because he thought Bob Costas taught here. He can be reached by email at jfeinbla@syr.edu or on twitter @joshfeinblatt.

Published on April 23, 2017 at 9:14 pm