William & Mary is the college Lara Jean plans to attend after she is not admitted to UVA, and for much of the story it stands at the intersection of her education, her relationship with Peter, and her effort to find a future she can call her own. She enrolls while imagining a year there followed by a transfer to UVA; after being accepted to UNC, she abandons that plan and gives up her place at William & Mary. The college is therefore both a genuine choice and a provisional answer—one whose meaning shifts as Lara Jean’s own priorities come into focus.

A school and a setting

William & Mary is located in Williamsburg, a place Lara Jean initially considers in relation to Charlottesville and UVA. When Peter’s mother suggests that her admission might be for the best, Lara Jean answers that Williamsburg is not very far from Charlottesville. Her reply keeps the two schools geographically and emotionally linked: even if she cannot attend UVA with Peter immediately, the distance between their destinations seems manageable.

The setting also offers Lara Jean ordinary pleasures and possible work, not just a name on an admissions list. Her father enjoys stopping at the Cheese Shop near campus for mustard and a roast beef sandwich, while Kitty likes the Williamsburg outlet mall and its freshly popped kettle corn. Trying to join in the excitement, Lara Jean imagines working in Colonial Williamsburg, churning butter in period clothes. The thought is playful, but it also exposes a real concern: she wonders whether the historical site would hire an Asian person in the name of historical accuracy. Margot counters that Lara Jean should be able to do the work, and says she would make the issue public if the site refused to hire her. Williamsburg thus appears as a place where the prospect of a new life meets questions of representation and belonging.

Admission and the first commitment

Lara Jean’s admission to William & Mary gives her a concrete alternative after the disappointment of not getting into UVA. Her uncertainty is not simply about whether the school is good enough; it is also about what other people think the change signifies. At a lacrosse game, she tells Peter’s mother that she will attend William & Mary. The woman responds sympathetically, saying it might be for the best. Lara Jean is unsure whether this means she is glad Lara Jean will not be at UVA with Peter, or whether she assumes the couple will break up. Rather than resolve the ambiguity, Lara Jean points to the relatively short distance between Williamsburg and Charlottesville, and the conversation gives way to cheering when Peter scores.

She does not treat the offer as a hypothetical for long. After settling on a prom dress, Lara Jean goes to William & Mary’s website and pays the enrollment deposit, a step she thinks she should have taken weeks earlier. The payment makes the school her active plan, even while other possibilities remain unsettled. When she later meets John Ambrose McClaren, he says he is choosing between College Park and William & Mary: he values College Park’s business school and proximity to Washington, D.C., while William & Mary is ranked higher but seems to him to be in the boonies. Lara Jean tells him she will attend William & Mary, and he responds with enthusiasm. In the same conversation, the college becomes part of a larger shared uncertainty about where their relationships and futures will lead.

A provisional year and a shared transfer plan

The initial plan for William & Mary is closely tied to Peter’s place at UVA. After Peter learns that he has earned his lacrosse opportunity there, he tells Lara Jean that she deserves to go to UVA too. He recalls Toney Lewis, a former student who attended PVCC for two years before transferring to UVA, and suggests that Lara Jean could transfer even sooner because she would begin at a four-year college. The possibility gives Peter a way to imagine undoing the separation that their different admissions outcomes have created.

Lara Jean admits that transferring had not occurred to her and that she is still adjusting to the fact that she will not attend UVA. Peter then sketches the future as a sequence: she will go to William & Mary, or another school that admits her, they will visit each other, and she will apply to transfer to UVA the following year. In his telling, William & Mary is the first stage of a route back to him. The plan offers hope, but it also makes her college choice dependent on a future application and on the assumption that she will want the same destination a year later.

That assumption is stated plainly in Lara Jean’s conversations with John and Chris. She tells John that she and Peter plan to try a long-distance relationship for the first year, and that she will try to transfer to UVA for the second. Chris, contemplating her own year away from college to work on farms in Costa Rica, asks whether Lara Jean can picture herself at UNC. Lara Jean answers that her plan is William & Mary for a year, then UVA; Chris observes that this is a plan Lara Jean and Peter share, and that it is why Lara Jean is holding back. William & Mary is consequently not just an academic destination but the first term in a relationship-shaped timetable.

Changing the plan

UNC’s acceptance briefly interrupts that timetable. Lara Jean is amazed by the news, especially because she had felt inadequate after UVA rejected her and understands that UNC is exceptionally difficult for an out-of-state applicant to enter. Kitty brings her back to the commitments already made: Lara Jean has sent her deposit to William & Mary and expects to transfer to UVA the following year. Lara Jean recognizes that, for the few seconds before Kitty speaks, she had simply been happy about UNC. Her immediate response is to reaffirm the old plan, but the moment reveals that the new possibility has its own appeal.

The decision changes soon afterward. Lara Jean informs William & Mary that she will not attend and sends her deposit to UNC instead. She tells her guidance counselor, Mrs. Duvall, who is delighted: Lara Jean will be the only person from their class going to UNC, and the counselor looks forward to adding the acceptance to the school’s list. The administrative acts make the reversal final. William & Mary, once a deposited and anticipated destination, becomes the school Lara Jean declines in order to take up a different opportunity.

Meaning in Lara Jean’s coming-of-age

William & Mary’s role in the story is defined as much by the future attached to it as by the place itself. For Lara Jean, it first answers the fear of having no acceptable path after UVA rejects her; Peter then recasts it as a temporary route to joining him. Its location, nearby in the geography of their plans, seems to soften the separation, while the proposed transfer turns that reassurance into a promise about the couple’s future. Yet the plan is still a plan, not a guarantee, and Chris’s question helps Lara Jean hear the distinction between her own hopes and the future she has arranged with Peter.

Her eventual withdrawal from William & Mary marks a change in direction without erasing the school’s importance. The college has given shape to months of imagining: Lara Jean pays a deposit, pictures a job in Colonial Williamsburg, and describes a year there as the opening move in a long-distance arrangement. When UNC becomes a real option, she allows herself to be happy about it and acts on that possibility instead. William & Mary’s narrative significance lies in this movement from fallback to commitment to relinquished plan. It shows that growing up is not only choosing among destinations, but also revising a future when a choice that once seemed settled no longer has to determine what comes next.