Eat your heart out, Ivy League, because Carolina Williams will be eating her pizza on the Plains.

She's literally on her way as I type. Auburn University's orientation starts Thursday. It's going to be busy. She has to unpack, move in.

Carolina Williams and her dad are on their way to Auburn. (Courtesy of Carolina Williams)

Most importantly, she has to change her location on her Papa John's app ASAP. And she won't be plugging in the zip code for New Haven, Conn.

She could have, though. What a story it would have made -- what a story it has made. The first one in her family to go to college, and she gets a "yes" from Yale, thanks not only to her great grades at Ravenwood High School in Brentwood, Tenn. but her 200-word application essay about how much she loves... ordering pizza.

"As soon as I saw the prompt that said write about what you love to do, that was the literally the first thing that came to mind because I just love to order pizza so much," Williams, who's 18, says.

Here's how she ended the essay.

Accepting those warm cardboard boxes at my front door is second nature to me, but I will always love ordering pizza because of the way eight slices of something so ordinary are able to evoke feelings of independence, consolation and joy.

Also experiencing feelings of consolation and joy? The person who reviewed her application.

"As someone who kept trying to read books for fun on top of thousands of applications this winter, I really loved your essay on reading 100 books in a year and I laughed so hard on your pizza essay," the reviewer wrote in Williams' acceptance letter. "I kept thinking that you were the kind of person that I would love to be best friends with. I want you to know that every part of your application stood out in our process and we are thrilled to be able to offer you a spot at Yale."

Williams' parents were thrilled, too. So were her friends. They convinced her to start a Twitter account just to tell Papa Johns the crazy news. She posted a picture of herself in a Yale shirt holding a plain cheese pizza (her standard). It got her some retweets and a few gift certificates. She swears it wasn't a gimmick, though.

I just want @PapaJohns to know that I wrote a college essay about how much I love to order their pizza and it got me into Yale 🍕👌 pic.twitter.com/lDlzEErHCn — Carolina Williams (@justcarolina22) May 9, 2017

"I thought about it for a while, and I thought that it was probably creative and stuff, and it was easy to write about because I really do love to order pizza," Williams says, "but I didn't expect that it would have such an effect on getting me in."

She also didn't expect it to have such an effect on the Internet. Her hometown paper called last week. Yesterday, the story made the AP wire. This morning she popped up on the Daily Mail. She's going viral.

She's just not going to Yale.

It's nothing against the place, she says. She visited. She liked it up there. But not even the promise of gaining a new best friend could convince Williams to reject her first love.

"As soon as I came to Auburn, I loved it immediately," she says. "I loved how friendly everyone was there. Everyone had so much school spirit. They're so passionate about Auburn itself. I've never met a person who went to Auburn that didn't like it there and I thought that spoke a lot about it."

Carolina Williams and her Papa Johns pizza. (Courtesy of Carolina Williams)

Williams received AU's Presidential Scholarship ($72,000 over four years) for scoring a Bo Jackson on the ACT. Today, she found out she also received the Edward and Catherine K. Lowder Endowed Scholarship from Auburn's Raymond J. Harbert College of Business; she plans to major in Business and minor in economics.

But in terms of factoring into her decision, the free money pales in comparison to the food.

Yesterday Williams tweeted a picture of a 2015 diary entry about wanting waffle fries and an original chicken sandwich, and of course she tagged the people who invented it.

"That's why I'm so excited about Auburn,," she says, "because they have a Papa Johns and a Chick-fil-A on campus."