Never Have I Ever: Where Does Devi Go To College?

Contains spoilers for "Never Have I Ever" Season 4

In the fourth and final season of "Never Have I Ever," Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) is finally ready to head off to college — but where does she end up going? That would be her dream school, Princeton University.

The journey getting there isn't exactly easy, though. Despite her perfect academic record and lifelong dream of attending Princeton, Devi knows that it's one of the most sought-after colleges in the entire country, and is perfectly aware that it might be tricky. What ends up happening next, though, is wild — after applying early decision, she gets deferred, meaning that she has to apply to several other colleges in order to make sure she has a backup that isn't Princeton.

In classic Devi fashion, this also goes wrong; she doesn't include a single safety school on her list and only applies to Ivy League colleges, which means that she ultimately gets rejected from every single school except for Princeton, where she's waitlisted. Naturally, she lies and tells everyone, including her mother Nalini (Poorna Jagannathan), that she actually got in everywhere, and it all goes steeply downhill from there.

After getting waitlisted — which is made all the more complicated by the fact that Devi's best friend Fabiola (Lee Rodriguez) was accepted to Princeton, potentially taking a spot that could have gone to Devi — Devi tries to pretend that she actually got into every single Ivy, only for her secret to be revealed to her disappointed friends and furious mother. However, spurred on by her academic rival turned love interest Ben Gross (Jaren Lewison) and Princeton representative Akshara (Janina Gavankar), she writes one last personal essay... about her late father.

The death of Devi's father Mohan — played in flashbacks by Sendhil Ramamurthy — is the inciting incident for the entire series, and writing a piece about losing him and his memory brings Devi's mourning full circle as she recounts how she and her father always hoped she'd attend Princeton. (As a child, she says she wants to attend "Princess University," so he suggests Princeton instead.) Before this moment, Devi feels like using her father's death as an essay topic could be exploitative, but the fact that she actually writes this essay just shows how much she's grown throughout the series.

In the end, everything works out for everybody. Devi gets an email that she's off the waitlist and has been accepted by Princeton, perhaps due in part to her personal essay. Fabiola elects to attend Howard University instead, wooed by their outstanding robotics department. Ben and Devi reunite and decide to give their relationship a real shot, since he's attending Columbia University in New York, and the two won't be that far apart.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about the show's ending, Ramakrishnan says she thinks Devi's journey to college felt exactly right. "I mean, college post secondary, it's not an easy route," she said. "But I think, in general, anything that you really, really want, there isn't an easy, clear-cut path right to get there. But it's nice to see, not failure, it's only just different paths that you didn't expect to take to get to the same end destination."

You can stream Devi's entire journey throughout "Never Have I Ever," a pitch-perfect high school comedy that spans from freshman fall to graduation, on Netflix now.