Thank you! I matched to Claremont McKenna College, which I did share in messages with some folks but might not have mentioned on the board. Admittedly I’ve had mixed feelings about it and the process, but have tried to keep my eye on the positives of it all.
You could just as easily ask whether a different essay could have caused you not to match at all.
This is definitely true, and I honestly thought my CMC essays were the worst. If any essay set me back institutionally, though, I chose to write about Richard Nixon for my one of my Questbridge essays, and although I expressed disagreement with his politics, it may have come off as defensive (which, on a personal level, is fair).
try to let the roads-not-taken go and get excited about what’s in front of you.
It is difficult, but I try. Thank you.
This is true, but I admit that I am a bit taken aback when comparing myself to people who were matched to Chicago, Penn, Columbia, and Brown. Particularly a good friend of mine who matched to Brown, and, while she is an amazing person, had a much more minimal extracurricular experience and more typical life story that I do. It’s difficult not to mentally drain oneself over things like this, especially when you have spent as many years stressing about this as I have, and for some places (especially Princeton, which had been a childhood dream of mine, and, unlike other Ivies, is rare as a graduate school destination), it really sinks in that I will never have the experience of being an undergraduate there.