<p>^kaukana you have a good point, but I don’t think less of myself for being less of an appealing admissions candidate, and I’ll explain why in a moment.</p>
<p>High school me took the SATs with a small amount of practice and testing in the high 1300s, a score that nearly automatically punted me out from the very top schools but I could shop to some great liberal arts colleges and Chicago-back-when. With the time I saved not worrying too much about my test scores, I read a lot of Bertrand Russell and was involved in exactly one student organization that wasn’t too demanding of my time, in which I held a significant position. I wanted to major in Classics and/or Religious Studies. I have a feeling I probably sailed through getting into Chicago-back-when, because I understood it and they understood me. Just the way I was a 50th percentile student on paper getting into Chicago, I felt like the literal average student once I got there. That’s another heads up for incoming students: remember that being average or below average isn’t a bad thing. You got in because you were above average in your original context.</p>
<p>Anyway the reason that this doesn’t bother me in the slightest is that every job in the universe is its own miini-college admissions process, and every job in the universe values different things, and different candidates shake out as more or less appealing in different ways. I was an average student at Chicago, and in the working world, I’d be a well-above-average hire for some employers, and I’d be a well-below-average hire for other employers, just being who I am with the resume I have. </p>
<p>So just because high school graduates leave for college assumed that the “social pecking order” is set, they’re in for a rude awakening when they realize that real jobs don’t always care about long resumes or good grades, they can care about skill sets that today’s high school students have no idea whether or not they possess yet.</p>