What word BEST describes the narrator's decision to apply to attend college

It depends. The golden rule is nothing is the best, except commercial ads. Decision to apply for college can take someone to the hell or the heaven, depending on what their motivation is (what they really want to do) and who they are.

Explanation:

If we judge a fish by its ability to climb, it will live all its life believing that it's stupid. I think the decision to apply to college is the same here. Get to know ourselves first, and then decide what we will study in a particular college. Then college will be a place where enable us to intensively study about what we concern most and meet others who have the same interest with us and maybe become our partners in our career path. My favorite example is the life of Steve Jobs, who met his dear colleagues accompanying with him to develop Apple as we see today in university. However, college can be the hell if we don't enjoy what we study there, then attending college is just time-consuming and fruitless.

Furthermore, some can succeed without stepping in college. In technology-driven world, we can gain knowledge and skills somewhere not necessarily at university. For instance, some online courses like Coursera or Edx offer free lectures from bigs universities. So, everyone can learn almost everything somewhere. The key of success is not attending college or not, the true question is: how big is your motivation?