I remember getting my acceptance letter to Pepperdine, but don't remember the same kind of details from the other acceptance letters. With Pepperdine, I was expecting The Letter to come in April, which is when I had heard the school was sending them out. So I was totally surprised to come home from lacrosse practice one day and see the letter on the counter - and no one in my family had said a peep about it! I tore it open and read it carefully, and I remember admiring how beautiful and hoity-toity the letterhead and grammar was!
I ran outside to find my mom, who was doing something in the yard. She smiled from ear to ear, gave me the biggest hug, and went on and on about how proud of me she was. Then I ran back inside, where my brother was talking to a friend on the phone and still wondering what was up with me running out of the house like I had. I told him, then he told his friend on the phone. I think he was just excited because Pepperdine was one of the schools he wanted to play baseball for when he was going to college a couple years later!
Funny thing is that Pepperdine was actually my #2. My #1 at the time was Boston University, but a specific program at that University that required special admission. I got accepted to Boston U, but not the program I was trying for, so that dropped them pretty much off my list. I would've loved Boston, but Boston U struck me as a little too much of a commuter school. That Boston U. letter didn't come until a week or two after the Pepperdine letter, and I wasn't nearly as excited about it. That should've been my clue that Pepperdine really was my first choice after all.
I was paranoid about not getting in to my first or second choice, so I applied to a bunch of others in case I couldn't make up my mind should those fall through. I ended up being accepted to all of them - USC (Calif.), Univ. of Washington, Univ. of Puget Sound, and Western Washington Univ.