Two years before finishing high school, I attended a summer science Bootcamp in Barcelona to learn a bit and try to make up my mind and decide what I wanted to study.
Already during the first days, I made great friends and learned a lot.
During one of those days, we had an opening ceremony. This took place at the headquarters of the foundation organizing the Bootcamp.
They gave us a few talks, and later we had this fancy dinner with all the participants, coaches, speakers, and researchers. This is important because there were professors of good reputation from some of the top international universities.
After dinner, we were talking, and one of my fellow participants, who later became one of my closest friends, told me: "One of the speakers works for MIT, we should go talk to him and ask him for a recommendation letter or something so we can get into MIT''. After he pronounced this sentence, I had a kind of revelation. I had never even thought of studying abroad. In my home country, Spain, barely anyone goes abroad to do a bachelor's degree. I started thinking how cool it'd be to study in a foreign country, in a top university, learning so much and living completely different experiences.
Since that moment, I promised myself that I would study abroad and do whatever it takes to make it happen. This was the best decision of my life. We talked to that MIT professor indeed, and although he couldn't help much, this thought remained in my head during the whole Bootcamp (which, by the way, was an amazing experience).
As soon as it finished, I started looking into application processes for the international rankings' best universities. Sadly I couldn't afford to go to the US, but I realized that as an EU citizen, it was quite cheap to study in a European country, so I applied for the best universities in Europe with bachelor's degrees in English.
I realized that most of them required extremely high grades, and since I wanted to make this happen, I realized that I'd need to study really hard during my final year of high school. So I did that, and I ended up with an average grade of 9.35 out of 10.
Fortunately, I got accepted in 2 of my top 3 choices, and I ended up studying at Delft University of Technology. It is consistently ranked as the best university in the Netherlands. As of 2020, it is ranked by QS World University Rankings among the top 15 engineering and technology universities in the world.
Once again, I can still say that was the best decision in my life. Studying abroad at a good university is an amazing experience, and I encourage everyone to do it.