Amara & The University of Southern California: What It's Like Attending A T20 University

USC was my dream and I made it come true.

I still remember receiving that big red packet in the mail that Spring day of my senior year of high school. I had just gotten back from track practice. Hurdle drills I think. My parents saw the white oversized and cardboard envelope decorated with that gorgeous maroon seal before I did. The red packet with the yellow USC emblem hid inside it.

You don’t even want to know how loud I screamed.

Not to mention I had gotten into my top program, a major in the Iovine and Young Academy for Arts, Technology & the Business of Innovation, which only accepted 30 students per cohort. A year later and I’d be an official Cinematic Arts minor at the best film school in the world. And I’m not exaggerating. USC is almost always ranked #1 in film— Steven Spielberg couldn’t even get in.

USC is the definition of work hard, play hard. The kids here are smart. Hovering around about a 10% acceptance rate, USC doesn’t let in just anyone in. By graduation I knew kids off to work in MBB, Big 4 Consulting, FAANG, and top media conglomerates, to act in movies, TV shows, and plays, to found their own startups, or to attend M7 Business and Grad schools (so many USC kids end up at Stanford or Columbia post-grad. I think it’s the big city to big city pipeline). And the list goes on.

And that’s not even truly getting into the amount people who signed to top acting and modeling agencies while still in school. One of my homies is literally on broadway…right now!

That was one of my favorite parts of going to USC. The school has a top ranked program in almost all industries from engineering to entertainment to politics to medicine to journalism, etc. This means that you are surrounded by the best of the best in all industries. I’d go from talking Oscar buzz with my film friends, to tech recruiting with my engineering homies, to politics and social reform with the pre-law kids. All in the same night!

Usually these talks would happen late into the evening, after one crazy party or another. Some of my fondest memories were all those movie nights and parties my roommates and I would host at my sophomore year apartment, staying up to the crack of dawn discussing quite literally the social and economic state of the world with our closest homies who knew they could always just crash on the couch if need be.

We knew how to have fun. How to go from partying on the West side, to getting exclusive dinner reservations in Mid-city, to talking our way into free tickets to an art gallery off Wilshire, to knowing homies who could get us into a film premiere in Hollywood, to a quiet Saturday thrifting on Melrose, to a farmers market in Brentwood, back to a house party in Silverlake. We'd even do ski trips in the mountains during the “colder” months and hit Mexico during spring break! But trust… we’d always be ready for whatever final we had on Monday.

But even more fruitful than the countless classes I took across design, technology, business economics, and film, was the mindset that I truly got to nurture during my time at school. People at USC get things done. So you have no choice not to do so as well. Soooo… I did.

I always wanted to work in film or tech. Or both (Hence the major). My USC degree (and somewhat founded confidence) has gotten me internships across both industries from A24, NPR, Disney, and Pixar in a Box, to Google and PayPal. Why? Because no one, not my peers nor my professors, ever told me that I wasn’t 110% capable of doing it all.

Oh, and don’t forget to hit the beach. Manhattan and Laguna are my favorites.

Fight on ✌️,

Amara