Nithya moved to the United States on a whim. While attending high school in Singapore, the day before she had to send her list of the colleges where she planned to apply to her counselor, she had one space left. She Googled “liberal arts colleges” and Swarthmore came up. “I didn’t do any research,” she says. “I just put it down—I hadn’t visited—and it was the first school I got into.” To be fair, after she was accepted, she did do a little more research, but she showed up on campus ready to start having never visited. But the decision paid off. “I loved it,” she says. “Swarthmore is really great, such a great experience. I mean, it was really stressful as well. But now when I look back, all I had to do was read books and write about books. Why did I complain about that?”