It goes without saying that the last month has been a trying time for all of us. While some of us are jumping with joy over our thick acceptance packets, others were staring with tearful eyes at the “regretful” message that once displayed on this screen. While I would love to say I’m one of the former, unfortunately I without a doubt, fall into the category of the latter.
But, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. During this admission season, I took a bet. I applied to every school I thought I was “fit” for, every school I thought I was “smart enough” for.
Ah, but maybe it would be more worthwhile to step back and take a look at my high school career first. I’m your standard Ivy League candidate. Took the ACT once, nat’d a 34. Straight A’s. All the extra-curriculars I could fit on my application. Valedictorian…of a 26 person class. My high school’s nothing much, it hardly stands out at all. Last year, for 7-12 enrollment, we barely managed 200 students. AP Classes? Pfft…We’re lucky to have honors history and English. Our school can’t afford AP classes (we can’t even afford doors on the bathroom stalls.) And I love anime. A lot. It showed in my essay (which I thought was a very nice creative piece about using the public transportation system to get to school in the morning.) It was the activity I elaborated about, and it probably took up a good portion of each of my interviews. (I even gave anime recommendations to the guy from Brown. 'Twas a fun day.)
And what didn’t I put on the application? I think I did miss out on a lot. I didn’t mention a lot about my mom’s sickness, or my CTY experiences, or any of the challenges I’d ever faced at school. I saw no reason why the Brown admissions counselor would have to know that I spent at least two hours a day on fanfiction.net, or at least one RPing. Those were personal matters and personal hobbies. Furthermore, those were things that even my classmates didn’t know. Oh, and nobody but MIT heard about my ADHD. 'Tis not a learning disability, but an integral part of me. I saw no need to fix a label, and even after receiving several very nice, thin envelopes, I still don’t regret it.
And from where did those nice, thin envelopes come? Well, two were mailed to my house after request from Brown and Stanford, there were three very nice waitlist letters (Middlebury, Tufts, and WashU), and a very nice online message from MIT essentially telling me to ■■■■ and never come back.
After dedicating four years of my life to this cause, and being promptly shut down, I had to look back and reexamine the situation. And then I had to question: Was an Ivy League ever the place for me?
A funny story about my MIT decision. 03/14/10 was Pi Day '10, MIT decision day, and the American release of Pokemon SoulSilver and HeartGold. Me, being the nerdy nerd that I am, was clearly most excited about Pokemon. In fact, me and my friends piled into the car and arrived at Gamestop an hour before they opened to pick up the game. After that, we quickly drove over to their apartment, where I spent four hours trudging through Jhoto with a Cyndaquil on my back before logging into MIT’s website. I read the message, let it digest, caught a Hoppip and named it “rejected” and moved on.
…Or so I thought, until I broke down in Calculus the next day. It was the first time I had ever been rejected so harshly, and it stung. Why wasn’t I good enough? What could I have done differently? Was this the end of my career as a brilliant scientist? This, unsurprisingly, was my train of thought for every major decision I checked, except for Yale (Whom I could have cared less about at that point.)
And then I took a look around at my friends. There had been several people in the room with me when I checked my MIT decision. Two of them were working full time at a gas station and Krogers respectively. One of them was enrolled in a local four-year university. One of them, and I kid you not, was in Community College after he had taken a semester off to play WoW. My small, private high school was full of children of doctors and lawyers, and yet I was spending my weekends with two college dropouts and two local students playing video games.
In fact, I learned a valuable lesson from my friend who worked full-time at Kroger’s. He had originally gotten the job to pay for college, but had to drop out after his freshman year because he couldn’t work full-time and handle classwork as well. He worked under high school students. And, when he saved up vacation time, he used it to take a week off to play Pokemon.
And you know what? He was happy. He is, to this day, one of the happiest guys I know. So why, if he had so little going to him (especially compared to CCs standards) was he happy while I was pouting over a fistful of rejection letters?
And that’s when I decided to smile. Because, really, college rejection didn’t seem that bad in the long run. As long as I was alive, I could be happy :3
