October 4, 2018
By Jeffrey Gu
Funny story, Talia asked me to write this column for the Musket about 3 days ago, and I have a rough draft due, like, today. She seems to think I know how to write good.
Fair warning: I don’t.
Last year’s College Bored column, penned by Lasya Rajan, was extremely well-written and offered eloquent, insightful reflections on the intricacies of the college admissions process.
Hi! I’m Jeffrey! I’ll be writing a little more like this:
AAAAAAAAAAHHHSLKDJF;KSDJ;AS;DKLFJ
AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
Hear that? That’s the sound of my screaming about college apps. You’re screaming too? Great! Let’s scream together!
There are many, many screamworthy aspects of the college application process. Choose where to spend the next four years of your life based on some generic adjectives and random statistics in our undergraduate admissions brochure that fails to actually distinguish us from any other college! Show us why you’re a good fit for our institution by encapsulating the entirety of your personality and life experiences in one extremely contrived 650-word essay! Be authentic, but also if you don’t match the specific type of person we want to see on our campus, we’ll reject you! You should put lots of careful time and consideration into said essay, but we have to read through a few thousand of these and sure as heck won’t get to spend more than 7 minutes on yours! Also, our financial aid timeline is completely separate from our application timeline, and you should probably figure that out sometime too! Do this during first semester of senior year, while you’re struggling with all your new classes and still trying to figure out what physics even is! Don’t stress, because these few months will determine the next chapter of your life, where you’ll be completely on your own, far away from the friends and family you’ve developed over the last few years!
You get the idea.
But hey! In roughly 193476048204832578 days it’ll all be over, and we’ll be free to develop senioritis and enjoy the last few months of high school. Yes, choosing a college is important, and yes, you should be putting a lot of time and consideration into them. But at the same time, you are so much more than 650 words and a few pages of high school credentials, and a college’s acceptance or rejection of you based on an application that was put together over the course of a few months does not and should not mean much in the grand scheme of things.
Even if college apps should be a high priority, they should not become an all-consuming process that drowns out the other good things in life. The world is really cool! People are really cool! You are really really cool! And while going to college is pretty cool, if the application process itself is preventing you from enjoying time with your friends and keeping you up at 2 a.m. scrolling through College Confidential forums, then something’s gone amiss.
The other day, my friend found a person on College Confidential who had made an account in 2009 and has made 83665 posts on the forums since then. That’s more than a post every hour for nine years. I don’t expect any of you to do that, but the principle remains the same – do not sacrifice living your life for college applications.
So lighten up a bit. Spend a day with your family and friends. Go outside and enjoy the last few weeks of beautiful weather. Watch that movie you’ve been meaning to see. We’re all going to be stressed for the next few months, and a lot of us are going to feel like screaming every now and then. That’s fine. We can all scream together. Just don’t spend all of the next 3 months screaming, ok?
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