<p>Some advice I wish I received back when I was applying to colleges:</p>
<li><p>Be optimistic, but be realistic. ** A lot of you prospective 2012-ers seem like intelligent, awesome, amazing people with stories to tell and experiences to share. You are awesome now, not having spent a day as a college student, and you will continue to be awesome once your college years are behind you. You should be happy with your accomplishments and you should know that your application will be taken seriously, but you should also be aware of other college options. You should be excited about the prospect of going to the U. of C., but it shouldn’t be the only school you consider. As my other posts have tried to point out, there are lots of fan-freaking-tabulous schools out there and they shouldn’t be ignored.</p></li>
<li><p> Do your other college applications NOW. If you’re unhappy with your college list, apply to a few “wildcard” schools. ** After you catch up on sleep and the episodes of “The Office” and “Grey’s Anatomy” that you’ve missed for the sake of college apps, do yourself a favor and churn out those other college essays while you still have some steam in you. The last thing you will want to do is fill out an essay on why you might want to attend school X after going through a deferral or rejection on school Y. If none of the schools on your list excite you the way Chicago does, consider changing up your list a little bit. If you want that big-city feel, consider schools like NYU, Northeastern U, Boston U, GWU, American U, DePaul, McGill, etc. If you want a school a little bit more detached from a city the way UChicago is detached from the loop, consider WashU, Emory, UCLA, Tufts, Boston College, USC, etc. If you want more of a liberal arts bent, consider Oberlin, Wesleyan, Beloit, Grinnell, Knox, Carleton, Vassar, Lewis and Clark, Clark, Goucher, Whitman, Earlham, Colorado College, Bard, Reed, Swarthmore, Macalester, etc. Consider that you might change your mind about what you want, so I encourage you to apply to at least one or two schools that don’t share quite the same qualities as each other. </p></li>
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<p>(For example, were I to apply to colleges again, I would probably consider Oberlin or Grinnell as a good counterpoint to UChicago for me-- I love the rural midwest about as much as I love cities, I like the “crunchy granola” vibes of Grinnell and the arts emphasis of Oberlin-- like UChicago, both schools are scholar farms, and both schools have a certain laid-back quality that Chicago does not. Had I suddenly decided that Chicago was no longer my first-choice school, I would have been relieved to be able to compare it to a school like Grinnell or Oberlin… assuming I had gotten into either, of course).</p>
<p>What I did do, though, was every time I thought about being at college, I situated myself mentally at my safety school. I spent a lot of time with that college’s course catalog, choosing out my “future courses,” kept up with the school newspaper, and I scanned all of facebook, looking for “future friends.” Once I got into Chicago, I was able to transfer all of my nervous excitement to an actual school, but before that, I didn’t want myself to get too involved with a school where I wasn’t sure I was attending yet.</p>
<li> ** A deferral really, really, really isn’t the end of the world. Really. ** Maybe by that time you’ve taken my advice #2 and have found other schools to fawn after, and may have even found schools that fawn on you back. (There’s at least one poster on these boards whose daughter was deferred early and accepted regular to Chicago, but in the interim Barnard gave her a thicker, prettier envelope with a scholarship in it, and having the decision between the two, decided to go with Barnard). At least one of my best friends here was deferred early (I don’t know why, he seems so spot-on Chicago), and it seems, that defer-accepts at Chicago are not uncommon. I found it helpful to have an idea in place of what I was going to do if I was deferred-- in my case, I would have sent in two more teacher recs (one of my teachers offered to excoriate Chicago for me if I needed it, another knew me very well and was a UChicago reject himself) and I would have sent in a writing sample. Some of you might find it helpful to think about the ego-trip you’ll send yourself on if you’re deferred.</li>
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<p>Anyway, once you’ve submitted everything… relax. Enjoy the fall foliage. Do whatever you do best. You’re going to college somewhere, and you’ll have the opportunity to read books, eat free food, stay up late, and drink foul-smelling substances no matter where you end up.</p>