What They Don't Tell You About Santa Clara

What you read in the headlines seems to be what everybody says about Santa Clara University. Everyone talks about the same things when they talk about this school. The campus is beautiful - the Mission Gardens with the palm trees drooping over the walkways, the Mission Church anchoring the center of the campus as it always has. The classes are rigorous and small. The research is renowned, the professors are accessible, the search for internships becomes something tangible. People say it’s a good school and they’re not wrong.

But that’s not what makes Santa Clara Santa Clara.

What people forget to tell you because they don’t realize it themselves, what you can’t put into a campus tour or a news article, is the way this place makes you feel like you belong to something bigger and more important than prestige. Something more needed.

There’s an ambition on this campus that isn’t loud or competitive in the way people assume a prestigious university to be. People here work hard because they want to, not because they are fighting for an internship or a grade with the person sitting to the right of them. And when they get it, the people around them cheer for them and mean it when they say they’re happy for them.

You feel it most in the small moments at Santa Clara: your professor remembering your name months or years after the class ended, a stranger in the gardens saying hello as you walk by, waving at your roommate from across the campus. Nobody is putting on a face for anyone because nobody has to or wants to. It’s a quiet sense of humility ingrained in this college culture that is hard to find elsewhere. At Santa Clara, you show up and people will know and remember you.

Maybe it’s the decade long tradition and values that underlie everything; the idea that success means being in service to something beyond just yourself. Maybe it’s just the fact that it’s a small school. I think it goes deeper than that.

It’s that small, tight-knit community. The one that continues to grow as each new class enters with every new year. With every new class comes a mix of personalities and perspectives, yet the community has felt the same these last four years. My senior year of high school, I didn’t think I would be going to Santa Clara. In fact, it was the only school on the West Coast I applied to. I applied because everyone I knew from Seattle was applying. However, it was the best thing that happened to me because out of it came a genuine community. I’ll never forget how quickly the nervousness in my body seemed to just vanish the second I stepped foot on the campus. Call it a gut feeling, but it was the community I knew I would soon be a part of.

We’re living through unpredictable times. The new feels like a slow accumulation of despair. And yet - the community that lies within these campus walls holds strong. This community finds ways to help, to stand in solidarity, to voice their thoughts and perspectives, to bring each other and everyone on the outside up. People continue to show up for each other and everyone else. In times where it would be easy for a community to fracture, Santa Clara comes together instead. It spreads knowledge, acknowledgment, and a hand to hold onto. That’s not something you can put on a tour. It can never be a statistic. You’ll never see this on a college ranking.

That’s what the headlines don’t tell you.