Brooke+Lockwood+2014

Musings on College Admissions

College. University. Université. It is kind of incredible the amount of stress, preparation, and sheer force of will it takes to get into your school of choice. The pressure is immense. Personally, no one is breathing down my neck forcing me to buckle down and get a 2400 on my SAT, but I almost wish I had that kind of resource. When you’re the only one that really cares about your future, and not in some abstract, parental way with the I-just-want-you-to-be-happys and the whatever-you-do-you’ll-be-fines, all of the responsibility falls onto your own shoulders. You have to sit down and study, you have to research your future, you are the sole fighting force against an army of admissions officers. Maybe it’s a bit selfish or immature, but I wish I had someone else in the trenches, someone I can blame if it all goes kaput. This scapegoat, of course, would be my parents, but, hey, in war there are casualties.

Oh, college. Sigh. The competition is, of course, formidable. Geniuses, olympians, future Nobel Peace Prize winners (young Aung San Suu Kyi, is that you?) are all in the ring for entrance into America’s top universities, and here I stand, a suburbanite who has never been published, has no clue how to program a money making machine of an app, and has yet to save a small country in Africa. Not that I am complaining. Of course schools want the best of the best, and it’s not like they are only accepting incredibly exceptional (or shall I say acceptional?) people. Most of the people these colleges accept, I’m sure, are incredibly normal, but in an above average kind of way. If the future Albert Einsteins and Nelson Mandelas make up twenty percent of a class, and say another twenty percent are those there for athletics or are legacies, than perhaps sixty percent are simply the well rounded folks who worked day and night for four years, sacrificing their sleep and sanity. To be a part of that sixty percent, that is where the real competition lies and you have to use everything in your arsenal- a killer GPA, high SAT scores, activities that say “she’s a real Renaissance woman” (or is the trend now “depth not breadth”?), hundreds of hours of volunteer work, summer programs, internships, and, to top it all off, a personality. But every high schooler applying to the top schools knows the risk, and it’s a massacre with acceptance rates hovering around ten percent in Ivy League admissions.

But, really, what’s the point? Why do we put ourselves through this? Is it the status? The bragging rights? Or are we all really fighting for the best education out there? Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate. That is not to say that applying to the best schools is a bad thing, even if you are just applying because you just know that Harvard diploma is going to look great on the mahogany paneling of your future executive office, but maybe it’s time we start trying to think in terms of the bigger picture. Learn because you love it, challenge yourself because you can, volunteer because it’s the right thing to do, not because you think Columbia will think that your 200 hours sending Snapchats from the hospital’s cardiology desk is impressive. Hey, wasn't there once a rumor that high school is supposed to be the best time of our lives? Maybe it's supposed to be. College is a mere snippet of a much much longer life, and it’s time that we live for the long term.