News Staff Writer
The worst part of the college process was filling out (over the summer) all the applications that asked me to summarize myself and my mission in life and how I plan to accomplish it at their school. It wasn’t so much the chore of writing of these essays that depressed me, but it was the overwhelming realization they made me come to... I don’t know what my mission is.
In high school, you are never really told to think about a direction. You are prodded with a bunch of academic stimuli from all ends of the intellectual spectrum: History, Math, Science, English, Language, all in an even balance. If you show even an inkling of enthusiasm about any of these subjects, your teachers are grateful. Most students whine and yawn and doodle through their classes and the majority of lunch-table conversations involve commiserating about the drudgery of homework and how many classes you have left.
But suddenly, when college apps roll around, you have to talk about what inspires you. You have to show how you have been avidly pursuing your intellectual curiosities and honing your interests since you were a child and say which subject matter and career path excites you. It’s hard to say which essay question did it to me, but after I turned in my last college application, I didn’t feel relieved, I felt useless. After all these years of personal development I felt like I knew who I was, but the truth is, I didn’t have that much to say. I was suffering from a severe case of College App. Induced Identity Crisis.
The syndrome started, for many, long before January 15 Regular Decision deadline. The vast majority of us who did apply early to a school were deferred, rejected, or any other variety of evil transitive verb, the proceeding application process is an insidious downward spiral of frustration, confusion and self-doubt. First you are hit with the initial shock of realizing that you will, most likely, not end up at the college where you spent countless daydreams at during math class. You will not be able to watch the latest episode of “Lost” instead of doing your homework every night during study hours for the rest of your senior year. You will, however, have to spend the holidays feigning enthusiasm about why ten different schools that were not your first choice are a perfect fit for you!
For many of us, receiving that consolation letter, photo-copy-signed “sincerely” by some indifferent dean of admission, is one of the more demoralizing things we have ever experienced. Something sinks in your stomach and is followed promptly by an eruption of rage, at yourself, at the world, and at the college. A friend of mine, who likes to sight see in Paris, admitted that the first thing he did when he received his online deferral letter was Google a picture of the school’s admission officer. He sat there, staring at the man’s face for a good half hour, letting the hatred seep out of him and manifest in the officer’s physical appearance. Then, after you think you have coped with the disappointment to a point of emotional decency, you go out of your dorm, away from your computer screen, only to face a procession of kids asking if you got in. By the time the special program rolls around, you aren’t exactly in the mood for holiday cheer (or for Dave Lighton’s entourage of caroling hooligans in the dining hall... sorry I threw bread crumbs at you).
But after a few frantic days of something between self-defeat and self-hatred, I finally realized that I was getting nowhere by resenting myself for not knowing who I was. I talked to some friends and realized that they were experiencing the same doubts and misgivings that I was. Though there are the few exceptional kids who shoot like bullets out of high school, fulfilling their self-proclaimed destinies that are outlined somewhere on an excel document, most of us are still just kind of meandering through adolescence. College is there to help you find out who you are professionally, what your grand goals are and how you will accomplish them. For now (because we’ve all taken biology) we are mostly like a bunch of undifferentiated stem cells. On those apps we all BSed a bit, “I want to be an engineer” (because I fixed my cell phone one time), “I have always been passionate about journalism” (I wrote The News’ “Around Campus” once) etc. But even if there is nothing remotely substantial backing up your claim, its ok. Just because you don’t know what to say when a bunch of colleges are trying to make you pre-maturely declare your life’s purpose doesn’t mean you don’t have one. You’ll get there, in due time if you just keep playing the game.
