- Senior worries about college admissions
On my somewhat disastrous seventeenth birthday, my best friend picked me up from my house and drove me to the side of a nearby mountain. Ominous though that sounds, we waited—and waited, and waited—for the sunset to arrive, scratching our initials into the wooden guardrail edging the concrete. Unfortunately, the sun set on the other side of the mountain, so we dejectedly witnessed only the day rapidly turning into night. That same feeling of suspense mixed with extreme disappointment has been with me for the past month almost relentlessly. Why? Just a little thing called college acceptance month, or when I find out about the future as I have come to know it.
The places I applied are not important to this column, nor are the outcomes of any of those applications, really. To give you an idea of the torturous application process, though, I can walk you through the first semester of my senior year. I spent a good portion of Christmas break (and the four months prior to break, mind you) slaving away over my twelve applications, ensuring that I could put my best foot forward in the admissions offices. Tears were shed, and more than once I declared that college did not sound all that appealing to me, anyway.
After all that work, then, how is it fair to still be worried sick about rejection? Typically, I am not one to be overly stressed; I will worry occasionally about a major project, sometimes bolting out of bed to write a to-do list in extreme cases, but I am generally more relaxed about my school work. In recent memory, only the thought of college acceptances has had my stomach in such tight knots.
Can admissions offices really ask kids like me to be perfect? Give me a break, I am only seventeen! Thousands of students are applying for the coveted 1,500 places at each of the twelve particular places of my choice… how can we be differentiated by only standardized test numbers and our essays? The admissions process has pushed high school students into a system of almost cruel competition, a system in which I would be willing to do almost anything to gain admission into a certain school. Why should I be carrying a stone on my back that feels increasingly like inadequacy, when I have not yet heard anything but good news? Four acceptances into March, and I still feel deficient in too many areas. The effort to stay positive and to remember that I have done the best I can throughout high school is becoming steadily more challenging. Luckily, only two more weeks remain until the last of the acceptances are released and all pressure is gone. That is, until decisions must be made…
Emma DiNapoli
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