I think American college applications are some of the dumbest and most stressful things to have come out of the nation since those non-hovering hoverboards that were all the rage in 2016. To apply to college in the U.S., one has to take a three-hour long standardized test; answer five billion supplemental questions for no other purpose than to stoke a college’s ego; and conjure up one, all-important essay that is meant to encompass your entire life, personality, and hardships in 600 words or less. All of these things are supposed to give institutions a glimpse into who you are, but how can they even tell, since all they’re seeing of you are your grades and test scores and carefully-crafted answers to supplemental questions? How are we even supposed to know who we are, when most of us apply to college in our late teens, well before our frontal lobe has fully developed?
As if all that isn’t enough to be stressed about, colleges seem to be dead-set on making the actual process of applying a literal nightmare. Most colleges are applied to through the CommonApp, except a few institutions that think they’re too special to use the same platform as everyone else, requiring applicants to create a whole new account for a different portal and fill out the exact same information as they did for the CommonApp, slowly realizing along the way that the portals are basically the same and this entire endeavor could’ve been avoided if colleges weren’t massively narcissistic. The application fee (yeah, there’s an application fee too) is usually $80, or over five hours of minimum wage work in Connecticut.
In other countries, the application process is much simpler: take a few tests, write one essay, and then bam! You’ve been accepted into university, now throw a party about it. The U.S. college application procedure is uniquely arduous in comparison. Nothing is standardized about it, not even application deadlines. Although early decision and early action dates are mostly the same across the board, regular decision deadlines span a period of nearly two weeks. Not to mention, students applying for scholarships or financial aid have another few deadlines and application portals to keep track of.
On top of the sheer amount of work that is put into college applications, students still have to manage school work, extracurriculars, familial obligations, and sometimes part-time jobs. Nowadays, every free period I have is consumed by both school work and college work—when I’m not doing my calc homework, I’m writing my college supplements. Once I’ve finished my Symposium reading, I open my laptop and stare blankly at the jumble of words meant to be my college essay. Life has become a juggling act, and it is incredibly stressful—but, the stress didn’t just start senior year.
Personally, I’ve been preparing for college since I was old enough to know what college even was. My parents put me in extracurricular after extracurricular as a grade-schooler, trying to find what would stick and look appropriately impressive on a resumé. Throughout middle school and high school, I was told to take the toughest classes, since that’s what the toughest schools wanted to see. I hate science, but I’ve taken AP Biology, AP Chemistry, and now AP Physics, all in the hopes that I’ll get into my dream school.
College has shaped every decision that I’ve made over the last four, five, 10 years of my life. Now, with the first round of applications due in a few months, I feel as though I am staring down the barrel of a gun I only knew existed through stories. It feels that much more real, to have the cool metal pressed against your forehead, rather than the threat of a bullet several miles away.
This sensation has overwhelmed me over the course of the past few months. I keep thinking to myself: what if I don’t get in? Of course, I know that I’ll be admitted to some college. I just don’t know if it will be my dream college, the one I’ve spent essentially my entire life working towards. What if all of that effort, plus the countless hours spent trying to decode and write and finalize my college application in the past few weeks, wasn’t enough?
But… that’s kind of dumb, isn’t it? I’ve spent my life measuring my worth through my academics: my grades, my accomplishments, what schools I may or may not get into. That’s not a healthy way to measure a human life, but it’s the way I have viewed myself for years and the way colleges will judge me when they receive my applications in the coming months. The system I’ve spent this editorial (and the past few weeks) criticizing and bemoaning, is exactly the thing I’ve been using to evaluate myself.
It’s okay to care about these things: grades, awards, etcetera. But I don’t like that I’ve let them dictate my happiness throughout my high school career. A B+ in a class does not make me less intelligent, a C on a test does not define who I am. I have friends and family who care about me, not because I do well in school, but because they like who I am as a person. I know that there are students, and maybe even faculty, at KO that think the way I used to, and I know that it’s a tough mentality to get through. I want to tell those people: it’s natural to want to do your best. You just have to remember that your “best” is not your “everything.”
