<p>I basically quit CC after my senior year since I found that I had sucked all the knowledge I needed out of parents and the few students here who actually knew what the deal is in terms of crafting apps. I got into Yale EA and proceeded to lounge in my cockiness and belief that I knew the master strategy of getting into anywhere. I applied to other school for giggles and for ego-stroking, and ultimately choose Pton because of a better fin aid package. I made sure to drop hints of this fact on the forum, since I wanted everyone to know. </p>
<p>Anyway, the point that I logged onto CC after months of inactivity and maturing to make is that you have to take you ego out of the process. In any endeavor where you may fail or succeed, you have to kill your ego. Your ego is your sense of entitlement, your sense of superiority, or inferiority. Your ego is what tells you that you have the right to be preachy, or that you should be bowing to someone else. Ultmately, college admissions to me was just about the ego - it was me deciding I could feel awesome because other people, namely the adcoms, thought my life amounted to something. </p>
<p>And so naturally, everything had power over me, even though I was prancing around like god’s gift. My sense of self-worth was external and I cared about managing other people’s perception of me, because my perception of myself and my happiness was not my own. </p>
<p>I just spent an hour on the phone, telling my cousin basically all these things in light of her deferral. Why do we care about admissions decisions? Is it really about the college?</p>
<p>Or is it about our ego. I think it’s 90% the ego in most cases where we feel awful or cocky around admissions time. At some point in life, you will have to learn to know that your life is awesome and worthwhile simply because you’re living it. And all accomplishments you have can only be described by one word, and that word isn’t Yale-worthy. That word is ‘yours’. And that you don’t need anything from any distant institution or person to know that your past is rich and worthwhile and that your future is anything you want it to be. </p>
<p>I wish I had learned this lesson before I went to college. It would have made life a lot easier. Remove the ego from the equation and the seemingly colossal importance of a single letter will plummet to the level of importance that it should be at. Realize that even if you did get into Yale, realize Yale’s acceptance is an outsider’s thought about you, and thus should have no bearing upon your own perception of yourself. </p>
<p>Take a break from CC. Find a new hobby. Feel proud of yourself from a plethora of reasons, none of which have anything to do with admissions. The problem wasn’t that I felt that I was awesome, the problem is that my feeling of awesomeness came from the wrong area. </p>
<p>Yeah, people judge you based on where you go to college. Irrelevant. The greatest thing college has taught me is to not judge myself on where I go to college.</p>
Still, it’s going to be hard to make kids who were rejected/deferred move on because to them, right now, things aren’t going to be okay until they’re okay. I.e. the fat envelope comes in from another awesome school/they realize that they’re having the time of their lives at a school that was their safety or sth along those lines. Words may reassure us, but we can only move on when we really want to move on, and that sometimes happens at the most unexpected times. Human beings are competitive creatures with egos. It helps us survive. But then again, so do compromise and moving on :)</p>