Joelle's Journal
By Joelle Gendzel
By Joelle Gendzel
March and April are notoriously difficult months for high school seniors. After working hard for roughly the past four years, we get to find out if these efforts are deemed worthy or not. Or, that is, enough to get into a college. Hard-working (and lucky) students see the fruits of their labors in acceptances to dream colleges. Many more are faced with rejection. After years of hard work, it is very difficult to be told you are essentially just not good enough.
Watching friends and classmates get accepted to various schools makes it easy to compare yourself and internalize college decisions as a ranking system for how much everyone is worth as a student. And it would be silly to deny there is some truth in that. College admissions are not a random lottery. Schools accept students they think deserve to attend and reject applicants who don’t make the mark. However, getting rejected from a dream school doesn’t have to mean high school was a waste of time, or that you are objectively less smart of a person than someone who was accepted.
Admissions officers judge applicants by little more than a few minutes spent looking at your application, a GPA dictated by classes taken years ago, and an SAT score representing a four hour slot in your years of teenage life. These factors seem like fair and objective mechanisms for ranking students based on both academic promise and personal merit, but truthfully there just isn’t a way to summarize your worth as a person into a package that can be easily understood by an admissions officer taking a quick glance at your application.
So, if you weren’t accepted into your dream college this year, don’t take it personally. There are many other ways to be fulfilled than attending a top school. Attending a community college or gaining work experience can be a better and more affordable option than immediately going off to a four-year university.
Watching friends and classmates get accepted to various schools makes it easy to compare yourself and internalize college decisions as a ranking system for how much everyone is worth as a student. And it would be silly to deny there is some truth in that. College admissions are not a random lottery. Schools accept students they think deserve to attend and reject applicants who don’t make the mark. However, getting rejected from a dream school doesn’t have to mean high school was a waste of time, or that you are objectively less smart of a person than someone who was accepted.
Admissions officers judge applicants by little more than a few minutes spent looking at your application, a GPA dictated by classes taken years ago, and an SAT score representing a four hour slot in your years of teenage life. These factors seem like fair and objective mechanisms for ranking students based on both academic promise and personal merit, but truthfully there just isn’t a way to summarize your worth as a person into a package that can be easily understood by an admissions officer taking a quick glance at your application.
So, if you weren’t accepted into your dream college this year, don’t take it personally. There are many other ways to be fulfilled than attending a top school. Attending a community college or gaining work experience can be a better and more affordable option than immediately going off to a four-year university.