NYU

NYU is a formative aspiration for Violet Markey and, unbeknownst to her for much of the story, an opportunity Theodore Finch also receives. For Violet, it represents a future imagined with her mother and Eleanor Markey; after the accident, she completes an application but never sends it. For Finch, NYU becomes a possibility concealed from even those closest to him, disclosed only after he disappears. The university’s significance lies less in campus life than in the plans, silences, and missed connections gathered around it.

Violet’s Longstanding Ambition

Since the summer before seventh grade, Violet has dreamed of studying creative writing at NYU. The ambition grew from a family visit to New York City: her mother, a college professor and writer, had completed graduate work at NYU, and the family spent three weeks in the city. Violet and Eleanor met their mother’s former teachers and classmates, among them novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and poets. The visit gave the university a personal and literary association, rather than leaving it as one name among distant colleges.

The dream also belonged to a period when Violet and Eleanor imagined lives beyond Bartlett, Indiana. They would talk about where they might go and whom they might meet, feeling out of place in their small hometown. NYU thus sits within a larger vision of departure that the sisters once shared. Violet’s attachment to the university is specific, rooted in her mother’s experience and her own interest in writing, but it also carries the promise of a future the sisters had pictured together.

The Application Left Unsent

Violet had planned to apply for early admission in October. After the accident, she changed her mind about NYU, even though she continued through much of the practical work of applying. When the subject comes up, her college choices appear geographically and institutionally diverse, but NYU is missing. She explains that she missed the application deadline: the regular-admission deadline had passed a week earlier, and she had filled out the application and written the essay without submitting either as an application.

That distinction makes the loss concrete. Violet did not simply fail to complete the paperwork or discover that NYU was unattainable; she stopped short of sending work she had already prepared. Her account places the interruption after Eleanor’s death, when Violet has also left their shared website untouched and feels that her own words died in the crash. The unsubmitted essay is therefore both a practical consequence of a changed plan and part of a wider withdrawal from projects associated with her former life. The evidence does not establish what NYU would have decided about her application; the decisive fact is that the university never received it.

A Family Trip and the Firsts After Eleanor

Later, Violet’s mother suggests taking the family to New York over spring break. The trip would be their first family vacation since the accident and their first to the city without Eleanor. Violet understands it against a succession of other firsts without her sister: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve have already passed, and this is the first calendar year of Violet’s life without Eleanor in it.

The proposed itinerary brings NYU back into view in a gentler but still charged form. Violet’s mother imagines seeing shows and shopping, and suggests stopping at the university to attend an interesting lecture. The suggestion does not restore Violet’s abandoned application or resolve her grief. Instead, NYU appears as a place the family might visit together, attached both to the mother’s earlier academic life and to the future Violet once imagined for herself. Her parents’ conspicuously hopeful manner further frames the proposal as an attempt to make a new family experience possible, though the account does not say whether the trip takes place.

Finch’s Acceptance and the Shared Future

NYU acquires a second, unexpected connection when Violet visits Finch’s sister, Kate Finch, while trying to understand material he has left behind. Kate recalls that Finch was supposed to go to NYU and reveals that he had received early acceptance. He had not told Kate or his mother. The family learned of it only because someone from NYU tried to contact him in the fall and Kate reached the message first.

The disclosure changes Violet’s understanding of Finch’s plans. She had not known that he had applied, much less that he had been accepted. She recognizes the coincidence that both of them had been meant to be at NYU, while neither appears to be going. That recognition is poignant but not a confirmation of Finch’s whereabouts: Kate allows that, for all she knows, he could be in New York at that moment. The unanswered possibility keeps the university connected to uncertainty as well as to the lost future Violet can name.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, NYU is presented through interrupted communication rather than enrollment. Violet’s application is prepared but withheld; Finch’s acceptance is real but kept from his family; the university’s attempt to reach him produces information only after he has gone missing. In both cases, the crucial fact arrives belatedly, through a conversation with family members rather than through the university itself.

The parallel is not exact. Violet knows that grief changed her plans, while Finch’s reasons for concealing his acceptance are not established here. What the two stories share is the distance between an imagined destination and an actual life: the same institution is a remembered dream for Violet, an undisclosed achievement for Finch, and a possible family outing in the aftermath of Eleanor’s death. NYU consequently marks futures that remain visible but unrealized, and makes the characters’ separate silences briefly meet.