How to deal with competitive friends

MWolf
Sun, 04 Oct 2020 05:35:40 +0000

The most important part of college is what you gain from college. It is not the rank of the college, how many famous people attended this college, or whether some random dude in the street has ever heard of this college.

Finding the best place for you is far better than obsessing over finding the “best place” according to the opinions of other people.

There is absolutely nothing positive about this obsession and “arms-race”. It reduces the colleges search to a competition for the largest number and the most prestigious admissions. It makes success at college secondary to success in gaining admission to a “prestigious” college. It causes teenagers to hang their self image and self-confidence on factors which have little to do with their actual worth. It glorifies classicism and money-based elitism. It drives students to nasty and needless conflict with friends and peers, to emotional and mental breakdowns, which can lead to self-harm.

If anything, refusing to play this game, and focusing on finding the colleges at which you will succeed and thrive, demonstrates maturity which is sadly lacking even in many parents of high-school bound students.

I think that the fact the you do not want to play this game says a lot about you, all of which is good.

Moreover, even if your GPA and test scores were the same as theirs, UC is just as amazing a dream school to have as any which they consider “worthy”.

In fact, so is USC, so is Pomona, so is Occidental, and so is San Diego State University or Humboldt State University, or any college which is the best fit for you, and which is the place at which you truly think that you will be able to do best.

It your dream college, and it is your dream, and just because your friends think that the college to which you will be admitted needs to be one of the colleges to which they have assigned value, does not mean that you need to follow them down this particular rabbit hole.

If they cannot respect that, if they cannot respect your opinions and your aspirations, taking a time out with them, at least until admissions season is over is not a bad idea at all. This is sometimes no more than a temporary madness which passes once admissions are over. if not, well, you will be attending college and you will meet many new people and make new friends.

Re: National Merit Finalists/Scholars.

In my kid’s graduating class there were 13 NMFs, none of who is attending a HYPSM. While three students from the class are attending Stanford, not one of them was a National Merit Finalist/Scholar, and none were of the students who had the highest academics in the high school (the students who got perfect 4.0 UW GPAs and the highest possible weighted GPAs).

Being an NMF has a lot to do with the ability to test well and a good day on the PSAT/NMSQT test - of the 13 NMFs, only 7 were of the students who had the highest academics in the high school.