Aspirations, rejections, and resetting it all...

AussieExchange
Sun, 11 Apr 2010 05:19:24 +0000

From what I gather, a lot of the people on this forum are quite bright, academically focused, and whichever other term you could use to describe this community. But, and I mean no offense, I feel that a lot of people are too concerned about the future and lose touch with reality. The fact is getting accepted into college is getting progressively harder, but, of course, students like to dream big; aspirations know no limits! It’s okay to dream, but it’s like that cliche goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall…

I wanted to go to a nice private school. I had my heart set on this school since my sophomore year and I thought I was doing a great job about keeping my grades and tests. Sure, I’m an…‘above average’ student (I really don’t like using terms like this to describe people), but I thought what really set me apart (since everyone at my school generally had the same scores I did) was my diverse extra-curricular activities. Well, I was wrong. The seventeen years of my life I spent drawing, doing various arts, film-making, sewing, tennis…all sorts of interesting things that could make me a more attractive candidate (think in terms of being a versatile, apt-to-adapt undergraduate) didn’t matter at all and the lack of ‘substance’ in my extra-curriculars prevented me from getting into my school.

Successive rejections were a real blow to the ego and I found myself close to a mental breakdown, but then I realized something…

It’s not the end of the world. Society puts a nice label on colleges and says ‘you’re it’ and ‘you’re not’, but life is far more complex than just a label and that, regardless of what people in this forum or those anywhere else say about any school, everyone has an equal chance of going to a top tier graduate school if one studies hard and never loses hope.

College is about what you do, not where you go and though I’ve seen this posted across many forums, I don’t think students take it to heart enough because they’re too busy running back and forth worrying about which private they should attend. Status doesn’t really matter all that much. A student could go to an excellent school and do nothing and then get rejected from his or her dream graduate school, having their seat given away to someone from a lower end public school (hey, we can never tell with the way admissions tend to work, right?). So, when I see all these incendiary comments like ‘this school sucks just because they’re too easy’ (and no school can be so easy that you can get a 4.0 by simply going there, so don’t think that because it’s a lie) or ‘take this school because that one is horrible’ I get irritated. Obviously those people haven’t done their research and they’re simply spreading their bias around because, hey, they’re only human. But the day you start believing those slanderous claims is the day you do yourself in, because if you have to go to that ‘horrible school’ you’ll really feel like a horrible student which is oftentimes completely false.

You make your college experience what it is. You invest as much as you want to get out of it and you can do it anywhere. Nowhere has it been written that any one person or one institution or one anything has the right to label you even though college admissions, standardized tests, and all that nonsense think that they can.

If you don’t get accepted to your dream school, it’s fine. Cry about it a little, but then peel yourself off of your bed, wash your face, and face the day, because graduate schools don’t want quitters, they want fighters and what better way to prove what kind of soldier you are than to push your way through four years of a place you never expected to end up at…and who knows, you might end up loving it. Save the money you would have spent on that 50K private school and go to the public or community college and work your way up. In the end, you have to pay for graduate school so you might as well minimize the amount of debt you have to deal with in the future.

My whole philosophy behind why Ivy leagues exist and whatnot is that those kinds of schools are excellent if you’re planning to start working immediately after college (which might have been feasible earlier on in --insert name of your country here–'s history), but when now that the qualifications have steepened and graduate school is usually required for specialized careers, maybe private school isn’t that feasible anymore (unless you happen to be very rich).

Anyway, in the end, don’t let anyone tell you who you are. What you do is what defines you, not what someone else says. So don’t believe the stranger that posts something biased about your school; do your own research and find out for yourself. But remember, rejection isn’t the end of the world like many seem to think. It’s a chance to start again.

And, after some serious thought, soul-searching, and thinking through everything I have just written, I’ve decided that I’d be much better off going to UCR than I would be if I went to NYU (again, no fear, guys! No fear!).

For those of you that read this and just shirk it off, I hope that this might at least be stuck in the back of your mind and that maybe, if this happens to you, you don’t lose faith in your future.

I wish all you high school students good luck and hope you all take control of your own futures.

P.S. Eventually, I might make edits to this post and perhaps make another one about what happens after I graduate from college…