With the early-application deadline process for applying seniors (at least for most colleges and universities), it’s safe to say that most my peers and I have been thrust into sporadic bouts of anxiety—or if not that: a chilling sensation stemming from a continuous climbing of sheer palpable dread.
This is not new, but it’s good to say out loud.
It may feel like you—the senior you are, the college freshman to be—you, are alone. That’s fair. You’ve never done this before. You’ve slowly figured out over these few years that many of the things you’d heard about the college applications process were false. But also that some things were half-true. It’s hard to balance nuance with assuredness because you’ve never known anything like it before, and you want the process to be a one-size-fits-all type-of-deal. That’s the point of the Common App, is it not?
Becoming more mature has taught you it isn’t and it won’t. Not only do all colleges have slightly different systems that all need to be min-maxed to some degree, but even compressing yourself for one college is difficult. The few years you’ve had to grow and experience all of high school are now condensed to one month to make one application to represent who you are—all your nuances.
It feels like you’ve swapped places with your application in a gross way where the paper is nuanced in what it wants, but you are flattened in what you can put in it. Of course it’s stressful.
These past few years, there may have been times you’ve done things for your own enjoyment, passion. Maybe you’re even the sort who felt ticked off when someone did something only for colleges. And now you feel crushed, because it feels like they were right all along and you were wrong. You feel like a hypocrite because you acted like you knew any better than those people, when neither of you knew anything much—and with how hard it is to fit a diverse skillset in, they may have been more right than you.
You aren’t marketable. You aren’t convenient. You can’t be one-size-fits-all no matter how much you try, and now it doesn’t even feel like the process’s fault anymore. It feels like yours.
…
Hold on to some advice for me.
It’s alright that not everything you do is good for your college application. The college you get into doesn’t define your high school career. Many people who do great in high school—socially, academically—don’t get into colleges that reflect their previous stature. It doesn’t mean they peaked in high school—it means they did things without thought of a reward. They joined clubs and made friends and went to parties without thinking about whether they’d be good activities for college, and they succeeded from it. They succeeded because they let high school be about high school.
Don’t fall into the trap of redefining everything around college now—because that wasn’t the reason you did things in the past. You did them for yourself. They manifested in high school, and they may stay in high school, but they are just as valid even if you can’t market them. You are just as valid for doing them. Don’t judge yourself to new standards just now because you didn’t have the hindsight three years ago to dress yourself for the Common App PDF you barely knew anything about. Because what that is, is also hypocrisy—but now to yourself because you’re forgetting what you cared about in the past.
…
It’s a cliché to “live in the moment,” but I feel that’s because it’s so obvious as advice that it barely counts to most people. It’s so obvious that it’s maybe the easiest, flattest philosophy to blame if something would’ve been better to do in hindsight. “Why did I do something I enjoyed rather than grinding?”
That’s disingenuous for one (you clearly did what you thought was the best option then), but also—the tendency to regard easy things as wrong is itself an easy thing. It’s the excuse that you push unto an immature, defenseless past version of yourself. It’s that convenient regret.
Sometimes people romanticize the difficult, painful things, but why? Because they’re hard? Why would you do a hard thing rather than an easy thing if you don’t know what doing said thing will even lead to? If it feels illogical to you now, it ought to feel illogical to a future version of yourself too. This too—is just a flat, hypocritical self-criticism.
Trying to regret a past that doesn’t exist anymore is impossible because you’ll never be in the position you were in at that time; the influences that pushed you to act in some way don’t exist as they once did.
More: the you who looks back on a decision only exists because of that decision—so you’ve made your mark. The nuanced you of now is the you that made that decision, so it shouldn’t be easy to regret. One decision couldn’t have made you any more convenient for colleges anyway.
…
The ripples in a flowing river won’t ever be the same twice in the same way the opportunities you had in the past can’t be fairly examined in retrospect. Trying to quantify relationships between effort and easiness and pain and progress in regard to College Apps will just bother you more.
Embrace spontaneity because you’ll never be able to properly regret it. Do what feels like the best idea now because you’ll never be able to do it again, nor will what you could’ve done otherwise mattered at this point. Regret is a lot worse than being unable to trust yourself in the hope you’ll find some perfect decision that will be infinitely justifiable from an indeterminable future. Don’t care if your river flows in the exact way you wanted it to because whatever ripples you make will be a lot more effective than if you never made a splash at all.
You did things because they mattered to you. Adding all of those little important parts up is the closest anyone can come to defining you. Inconvenient, unmarketable, nuanced you.
