Go back to our prospie database.

Jeffrey Cattel, a prospective Medill student from Canton, Mass., was introduced to Northwestern as a rising high school senior in Medill’s National High School Institute “cherub” program, a summer journalism program at Northwestern.

The five-week stay was “better than any college tour,” Cattel said, and now has him leaning heavily towards Northwestern as his college of choice.

The news and opinion editor of his school newspaper Spectrum, and a contributor to a local newspaper, Cattel had his eyes set on journalism, and especially Medill, as he began the college application process.

In fact, Cattel applied only to colleges that offered a journalism major or a separate school of journalism.

“I’ve known for a long time that journalism is what I’m passionate about,” he says.

In addition to Northwestern, he was accepted at Syracuse University, University of Maryland at College Park, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Wisconsin at Madison and University of Missouri at Columbia. He was rejected from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and waitlisted at New York University.

The rejection, he said, is hard for anyone, but “for me it was a little bit easier. “I was trying to stay on the bright side.”

Cattel says that other friends who applied to Northwestern received their decision e-mails several days before he received his. Getting the e-mail after days of waiting, he said, felt “surreal.”

“I waited for so long — at that point I had kind of accepted that I’d wait for a letter,” he said. “I was going to go to bed, and then I saw [the e-mail].” But Cattel is waiting for his financial aid package before he commits to Northwestern.

“I’m really interested in Northwestern because of all the places I applied, it’s on a different level,” he said. “Not that I wouldn’t be happy at another school, but it’s just at the top.”