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My advice to high school seniors applying to colleges is to keep everything in perspective. The college you go to will not determine your future. What matters really is what you do in the college you choose to attend. Lots of people on this website do some really amazing things and have taken advantage of many wonderful opportunities, but we don't hear gratefulness or really much of an acknowledgment that what they're doing is wonderful. What you hear is, "How much will this help me get in to college? How much will I stand out?" My honest answer, which I tend not to give, because it will annoy some people, is, "Who cares? You're giving so much of your time to volunteering. Aren't you enjoying it, if you're spending that much time on it? If you don't like volunteering, you should probably do something else you enoy."
The discomfort of this answer comes in the different goals I have for the senior and the ones that the high school senior asking this question have. The goal of the senior is to get into an excellent college. My goal is to get the senior to enjoy what he does. The senior's actions rest on the false idea that it is possible to "look good" to colleges. The true idea is that if you do what you enjoy and pursue it (Does it really take people to tell high schoolers to have fun and do what they enjoy?), you will probably look good, or good enough. But even then I'm not satisfied, because that would mean that the senior is indeed trying to look good, but is doing it by doing what he enjoys. The solution: Try to completely forget about college applications and looking good to colleges. Be yourself. Do what you like, within certain limits, of course. Do well in school, not because colleges want to see A's, but because you have a genuine interest in learning.
That is the true test of Intellect: a genuine interest in learning and a passion for the hard work it takes. Intellect isn't found when seniors cram for a college-level exam by reading through study guides to make up for their refusal to read the textbook.
Will all this get you into an Ivy-league school? Maybe, and maybe not. But even if you do everything with the goal of getting into an Ivy-League school, your chances probably wouldn't be any higher than if you were a genuine, authentic you.
The Ivy-League name isn't what it used to be. It might help to open doors to jobs, but studies have suggested that the income of Ivy-league students isn't necessarily any higher than that of college students who didn't go to Ivy league schools.
The application process doesn't have to be complicated either. And it really doesn't have to be difficult. Just fill it in, as best as you can. The section for EC's on the CommonApp is short because college admissions people probably don't care that much about what awards you've won unless they're truly spectacular. They're looking for a general feel of what kind of person you are.
Once you get accepted into whatever schools you get in, you've got to choose one. I remember having a hard time choosing between Swarthmore and the University of Chicago. I was attracted to Chicago's Core Curriculum (Swarthmore has distribution requirements) and it's excellent location, and I felt that it might be more exciting to be in a school with a larger population than my high school's. But Swarthmore appealed to me because I've visited Swarthmore before and liked it a lot, whereas I hadn't visited Chicago, there seemed to be a closer-knit student body, and everyone there was just so nice and wonderful. I could go to Chicago for grad school later. And Swarthmore's financial aid was so much better than Chicago's. In the end, the financial aid package does matter. And so I picked Swarthmore, and I'm very happy here. But I would also be happy at Chicago, or Reed, or Carleton, or the Honors Program at the University of Washington, all of which I got into. The name really doesn't matter. It's the resources to achieve your goals, and what you do in college, that matters.
Remember to be a genuine you, not because this will help you get into college (even though it will), but because being genuine is a wonderful way to live, and that's more important.
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