| Rejected from Top SchoolS
It just hit me. It's actually really weird that it's taken this long. For the past year or so, I've anticipated this moment with extreme fear and anxiety. For the past year I told myself I would either stand out and be someone who garners respect or else I will just stop trying and at least stand out, albeit in a completely different way.
I applied to all of the Ivies because I knew already that to a large extent, so many qualified candidates apply that any one person might have as good a chance of winning the lottery as they do to be accepted. I just improved my chances. I applied to all of them, though in reality I probably would never have gone to Brown or Cornell. I just wanted to see if I could get in, to see if I could prove my worth, if that makes sense. Though I applied to all 8, in the past year I really fell in love with both Princeton and Yale. I toured both, and quickly I couldn't imagine myself anywhere else.
I applied to Princeton EA and was deferred. And that sucked. But I consoled myself with the knowledge that the EA pool was composed of applicants who have wanted to go to Princeton for their entire lives-- they were the best of the best. And certainly the fact that I was deferred (and not rejected) meant that my statistics were such that I could have been accepted to an Ivy-- I just wasn't good enough to make that cut.
And then from January to March 29 I anticipated the worst but hoped for the best. I wasted away the last semester of high school of my life trying to make March 29 come sooner. And then I was rejected from all 8. Okay. So what was the past four years of my life for again? A full AP and IB schedule (and straight [high] As). Months of SAT / ACT prep-work. Literally thousands of hours of community service, leadership, and local youth Conference planning. Years of competing with people for no reason at all.
And after reading that people will tell me-- everything happens for a reason, that though I was rejected, I learned how to be proactive and how to manage my time and how to be a diligent worker. And to that I say so what. I've always known how to do it. But why the hell did I waste my time working so hard for something when I could have done literally ANYTHING else and still have gotten into the schools I got into.
I wish I could go back and relive my life, take back the moments that these rejections didn't care about. And I know that there were so many more qualified candidates. I so understand that. But at the same time, it frustrates me when I look on these decision threads for Harvard and see "SAT Score: 1990, Ethnicity: Hispanic" or "Rank: 12 / 160, Legacy." And then I see threads in which people say they are "depressed" that they have to choose between two or even all three of HYP.
It's all so silly in retrospect. Why would anyone work so hard for something when they know that even if they are the most qualified candidate in the entire world, they are still not guaranteed a spot-- they still have to win the lottery. I'd like to give some advice to any underclassmen or parents whose children will soon be facing high school: enjoy your years in high school. Because in the end, it doesn't even matter.
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