For Incoming, College Bound, Freshmen Who Probably Won’t See The Light Of Day For The Next Four Years
by Mari Monosoff-Richards
As one finished with the college application process, I can accurately say that it sucks. I personally had a nasty experience with it. As a small child, I told people that “When I grow up, I’m gonna go to college!” During this distinguished process, I almost decided that it would be easier and more worth my time to just forget the whole college thing and work at Burger King for the rest of my life. It wouldn’t be too bad; I hear that there is such a high turnover rate that you become a manager in no time and rake in the dough. What’s the point in going to college other than being able to make good money in the long run? I suppose you’re supposed to learn about the pleasures of learning, but honestly, spending $45K a year to make friends and eat greasy cafeteria food doesn’t seem quite worth it. Working at Burger King, I can skip paying $180K for four years of college, eat crap food, and I’ll get paid in the mean time!
Freshmen year, you think you’ll be safe from college madness. You think it is a year to become acquainted with your new school, try new things, and make new friends. Wrong. Unless you don’t care about your life and plan to live as a crazy homeless person on Shattuck, it is required to take honors math and Latin. I’m sorry, what’s that? You don’t have time to see your friends because you have to translate 300 lines every night from a language no one can actually speak? That’s really sad, but at least you’ll get into college.
All throughout high school, it is stressed that you have to actively participate in different activities. The application confirms how important your extracurriculars are. You have to be involved in a spectrum of different clubs, sports, and volunteer projects that are each rated by how long you did them for and what important positions you held, if any. Some have to be academic extracurriculars, like belonging to the Latin club or working at the library, and others have to be fun, like rowing for a crew team, working in the school’s theatre, or obtaining the world record for the largest collection of chewed gum. In order to go to any college, be prepared to be involved in at least twenty five activities. In at least ten of those activities you must hold some sort of leadership position. Fifteen of the activities you must continue all four years of high school. Anything less than this is seen as failure.
Do not be deceived by how exciting the process seems at first. As a sophomore you take the PSAT. It’s exceedingly boring and long but there is a tiny box in the beginning of the test. By checking it, you are guaranteed to be spammed by postcards, brochures, letters, and emails from colleges that are “interested in your devotion and passion for learning.” For a while these letters are exciting. Then you start getting so many, a whole mail truck has to come to drop off the boxes and boxes, and you realize that all the letters say the exact same thing. (This must be why tuition is so high.) To top it off, the girl in your math class who is annoying and brilliant starts to brag about how MIT and Harvard sent her a letter. Everyone is shocked and jealous! Although none of us want to go to MIT or Harvard, we don’t understand why they want her.
Then comes the notoriously nasty junior year. By now you don’t care about the nice little letters. First there are AP classes. If you take only five, you’re a slacker and people give you worried looks as you pass down the hall ways. How can you possibly be giving up your life like this?! How dare you choose sanity over more AP classes! At the end of the year you will spend $530 to be bored for hours on end while taking monotonous tests that are supposed to prove that you’ve learned something.
Spring break is spent being packed in a suitcase by your parents and dragged across the country to schools you know and care nothing about. I was told that it was supposed to get me interested in applying to college and show me what I am really interested in obtaining while attending a fine institution of higher learning. What this means? I still haven’t figured out. You will be forced to sit in on five classes at each college, chat up the professors, go on tours, and finally undergo The Interview.
“Marguerite? Hi, I’m Ruby Pensfield. I’m the west coast admissions officer for –insert name of college I’m visiting on that day- and I’ll be reading your application! Are you ready to come to my office?” A bubbly woman with a stiff suit says in less time than it takes my heart to beat. You get better at interviews the more you have, not because you feel more comfortable- you’ll always feel like you’re about to puke and have the hives- but because you can finally begin to understand the questions they ask so quickly. “So you go to Berkeley High, can you tell me what that’s been like? How big is it? What classes have you taken? Are you actually an acceptable applicant for my amazingly prestigious college or are you wasting my time? What are your extracurriculars? Only ten! What have you been doing with your time, sleeping? What life changing experiences have you had? Oh God, not another sob story please, I might puke. Describe yourself in three SAT worthy words.”
The interviewer kicks you out of the office with a polite, “Thanks for your time; I look forward to reading your application! Good luck with the application process.” The tight lipped smirk reminds you of your seventh grade teacher when you gave him the wrong answer to a question in history and he was about to humiliate you in front of the class. You’ll always end up sitting in a chair in the lobby, shaking and sweating for a few minutes before you can find the strength to stand up after the hurricane of questions.
By now your parent’s friends are asking you where you’re going to go to college, not realizing you still have absolutely no idea and are beginning to realize what a dumb idea it is anyways. They tell you to go to their college, even if they hated it. It has to have been better than they thought it was. They just didn’t appreciate it.
At the end of the year, your knowledge of filling in bubbles is tested. At 5:30 am you show up at your high school on a Saturday morning. A banner saying “SAT Registration” cheerily greets you. (I personally recommend responding to it with rude words and better, a leering gesture.) Seventy three sections of multiple choice questions await you. One entire section is used as a way for the College Board to use you as a guinea pig and test confusingly worded questions that they will then use for future generations of test takers. I don’t quite understand how the College Board gets away with its business. I thought US Law didn’t permit monopolies. Yes, the ACT does exist, but other than in the Midwest, no one uses it. You can get a perfect score on the ACT but no one cares because it isn’t taken as seriously as the SAT. The College Board makes everyone pay more and more money for things that are required for college bound students to have. They aren’t a government company and they also aren’t a non-profit. Maybe it’s just my Berkeley roots talking, but I don’t think that’s fair. If you screw up and don’t get a high enough score, you can always take it again and again. If you take it too many times, you’re trying too hard and are oh so broke.
An extremely important aspect of the application is writing the college essay. The theme of your essay should be able to be summarized in a sentence that you repeat several times throughout each paragraph. It’s great if you can tell a story that shows why you are an amazing person and better than the rest of the world. If you haven’t had any life changing experiences by the age of seventeen, you probably aren’t mature enough to go to college. Try to do something meaningful like break every bone in your body and go through a painful recovery process, get violently shot trying to save something, or travel to a third world country and realize what true poverty is (then solve it). Working at your church’s free lunch no longer cuts it.
If it weren’t for the Common Application, I would already be working at Burger King. I can’t imagine life without the Common Application. A FREE online program that colleges allow to be substituted for their thirty page paper questionnaire. This is the only thing that has anything to do with college that will be free. Lots of information is necessary to complete the Common App. Your full name, your hair color in fifth, seventh, ninth, and eleventh grade, your marital status, number of siblings, classes you’ve taken in high school, classes that you’ve taken outside of your high school at a near by college, your ridiculously high test scores, your parents life story, your extracurriculars, US patents, articles in Science Magazine, the academic honors that you have received for finding the cure to cancer, and of course, the long and short essays. When you’re finally done, everything you’ve worked hard for the last three years looks like nothing when filled in tiny boxes. You select the names of the twenty four colleges you’re applying to and pay each admissions office $50 for spending five minutes staring blankly at your pile of papers that have collected in a folder at their office and arbitrarily putting your folder in the in, out, or wait pile.
After hitting the submit button, you will expect to be done, and are ready to kick back your heels and just wait for The Letters. Unfortunately, you have now entered the admissions kiss-ass phase. You are expected to write letters to the admissions office and your regional representative and tell them how excited about their school you are. I quickly became fond of the copy and paste method. Of course, you have to be careful to actually change the name of the college you are writing to. That might be why I didn’t get into Yale…. If you play sports, at this point it’s also a good idea to make sure that you’re best friends with the coach of the team you hope to join. If you play lacrosse or row crew, you’re guaranteed a place in the colleges accepted pile. Doesn’t matter how dumb you are, you’re catered to. You probably should have done all this before you submitted your application, but it’s still not too late.
Next comes the long wait between January 15th, when apps are due, and April 1st, the national response date. As previously mentioned, you write small notes to various people at the twenty four colleges you applied to, showing them that they and only they are the college for you. In general, you relax while occasionally longing to hear where you have been accepted into college.
THEN! The first letter arrives in your mailbox. My mom was so excited she called me in the middle of calculus to tell me I got a large envelope from college ranked 5 out of 24 on my list of colleges. I was pleased. It was oh so satisfying to brutally rip open the envelope to reveal the long awaited letter.
Dear Marguerite,
As dean of admissions at College Five, I am pleased to offer you entrance to College Five’s class of 2011! We felt that you have the potential to succeed at our highly competitive college and will make us proud. You flourished while the rest of our record number of applicants wilted when placed next to you. Your hunger for knowledge and desire, passion, and willingness to learn make you the perfect candidate for our school! To further encourage you to attend our college, we’re going to make up an honors scholarship and offer you $7,000 a year! In case you can’t do the math (we are a liberal arts college and believe that knowledge in all subjects is important, but math is really boring so it’s ok if you actually never fill that requirement), we’re offering you 15% of the stupendously high tuition a year! You’ll still be in $152,000 of debt when you graduate, but you’ll be ready to take on the world with the stellar education that you have received at College Five. If you don’t keep up a good enough GPA, gain the freshmen 15 or don’t contribute to campus we may take it away from you.
Congratulations once again and I hope to see you in the fall!
Sincerely,
Admissions officer at College Five
At last! You did it! You got into college! You feel so special because they made up a scholarship just for you! In the following days, you will receive your letters, some acceptances, some waitlists, and some rejections from colleges 6 through 24.
Dear Marguerite,
This year we had a record number of 3 million applicants for five spots. You were a worthy competitor for some of the other applicants but unfortunately we’re inviting them and not you into our class of 2011! Although you may believe that you should be on our waiting list, we really don’t want to read your application again.
Sincerely,
Officer of Admission at College Sixteen
Doesn’t it suck to be you? That really stung didn’t it. You knew that it wasn’t going to be good news because it was in a small envelope, but you still hoped that it might just contain a wait list invitation.
I still puzzle over why they’re inviting me to wait in limbo. I wish they’d just say:
Dear Marguerite,
This year at College Twenty we had a record number of applications. We thought you were pretty cool but most of our applicants had thirty extracurriculars and you only had twenty five. Even so, we’re putting your on our waiting list. You’ll hear from us by like July 7th or else you won’t, and we hope you get in somewhere else. Sorry if we broke your heart.
See ya,
Officer of Admissions at College Nine
Eventually you have heard from all twenty four colleges. You were accepted to fifteen, waitlisted at three, and rejected from seven. You didn’t get into Colleges One or Two and are heartbroken, but you still really like Colleges Three through Eight. You’ll remember visiting their campuses when you were a junior, so long ago. Eventually you’ll realize that your top five choices are all basically the same and arbitrarily decide to go to College Four. There was no real rhyme or reason, but you’ll be happy there. When you send in your Intention to Register form, College Four will send you a t-shirt that has their name in big letters and some sort of motto. They expect you to wear it and make all the kids who didn’t get into College Four feel bad.
The college admission process that has lasted for four long and fairly uneventful years will have concluded. All that’s left is to not fail any of your classes, go to prom, participate in the senior streak, and walk the graduation stage. The senioritis that has slowly crept on you will suddenly make you sick when not exposed to direct sunlight and will increase unless you attend fewer than three classes a day. This means sleeping through first period and getting to school five minutes into second. Lunch lasts through fourth, and fifth is your last class of the day. A hazy recollection of once going to a sixth period class remains.