To most students, Oberlin is first and foremost a college. The town is simply a place with good Chinese food and a pizza joint that is almost always open. But for 25 students currently enrolled at the College, Oberlin the town came long before Oberlin College.

In 2001, the College instituted a program offering scholarships to Oberlin High School students who attended the school for four years and were accepted to College. Although such students were required to apply and be accepted by the same process as the others, the program made the College a more appealing and affordable choice for some.

However, some students didn’t need an extra reason for applying to the school.

“I would’ve applied here even if I didn’t live here,” first-year Casey Ashenhurst said. Ashenhurst also applied to Earlham and Wesleyan.

When looking for colleges, freshman Jeff Schubert stuck to Ohio colleges, applying only to Kent, Ashland and Wooster. “Oberlin felt like a better fit than the other Ohio colleges,” he said.

“I only applied to Oberlin,” Oberlin junior Martin Mitchell admitted. “It was either this or nothing. I was originally interested in the TIMARA program.”

In his first year, Mitchell lived in a quad with two other freshmen from Oberlin. He has since lost touch with them as he took sixteen months off from the College, during which his high school classmates graduated.

He acknowledged that he should have considered other schools.

Both Ashenhurst and Schubert said that they hung out with the College students even before becoming students at Oberlin.

“They all seemed pretty cool, some kind of condescending,” Ashenhurst said. “Not because I was a townie, though. They were just normal people, college students.”

“I always wanted to be a college student here when I was in high school,” Schubert remarked. “I worked at the bike co-op for a few years and got to know some of them.”

Mitchell, however, had a different impression of Oberlin College students when he was in high school.

“I didn’t know them, so I didn’t really know what to think,” he recalled. “Overall, I guess I thought they were kind of weird.”

Besides Mitchell, who admits to being somewhat bitter about being a twenty-two year old junior, both Ashenhurst and Schubert are happy with their choice of school. All three agreed, however, that they would like to leave Oberlin graduation. After living in Oberlin for more than twenty years, they will be ready for a change of scene.