Insights to University Applications

After submitting a few uni applications, I remembered my dad’s credit card number, expiration date, and CVV like the back of my hand. Around this time of year, all seniors start dancing a tarantella: asking for recommendations, transcripts, predicted grades, and other details to submit to the university of their dreams. Frantic faces trying to keep up decent grades as deadlines approach; what a sight for sore eyes! Not everyone can keep up with the rhythm, however; some may trip and fall and lose it all. By “not everyone”, I am referring to myself.

Firstly, I would like to preface by saying that I wrote this essay on the same day that it was due. Why? Because I haven’t skipped a single supplemental essay day, which trained my writing muscles to be the size of the Earth. The Common App forced me to exploit every interesting aspect of my being, from 5th-grade quirks to personal issues that I’ve kept secret for 17 years. The myriad of questions about identity and interests is destroying what’s left of my sense of self. I’m not sure if I really enjoy soccer, knitting, selling old sweaters, nor hanging out with senior citizens (these aren’t actually my extracurriculars).

It feels as if college admission is a business. If you want to get into an Ivy League school, keep dreaming unless your parents paid $500K to this one college counselor to help you get in. Liberal arts college? Ha! Keep dreaming, still. The rise in the “prestige” of Massachusetts’ LACs is probably worse than that of gas prices. Boston University’s average admitted GPA went from 3.7 in 2017 to 4.2 in 2024. The same goes for Northeastern, where everyone and their mothers applied to for Early Decision.

Just putting in time and effort to getting good grades at school isn’t enough anymore. Balancing sports, friends, extracurriculars, housework, and schoolwork is a lot on one plate. Keeping everything in equilibrium doesn’t always work out- aspects of life slipping from any grasp of control as I focused on a single, important task. It’s devastating to sit there and do nothing. I knew that by fixing other parts of my life, I would let go of the thing that is in control.

The game of choosing the sacrificial lamb is never fun, but it forced me to tribulate what I truly deemed important in the moment. Myself included, many high schoolers struggle to understand what they want out of college or university. We are told as naive children that we should want to go to Harvard, Princeton or Yale, regardless of what we truly desire out of life. Maybe going to Harvard, Princeton or Yale is your life’s goal, maybe it isn’t. At the end of the day, none of this matters unless you deem it important.

I’m choosing to not instigate too hard during this senioritis season. The judgment that surrounds university applications is a sickly shade of green, and ultimately pointless. Of course I’m still going to look at others’ college acceptances for fun, but there’s not much that I can change about my application at this point. Plus, it’s senior year! Focus on actually enjoying the little time you have being a jobless kid who doesn’t pay rent.