An Open Letter/Rant to the College Application Process

 

I hate the College Application Process

 

Very hot take, I know. But why I think the application process is so unbelievably broken and contrived goes far beyond just the amount of stress it causes(which is a lot). 

 

I hate the fact that I feel like my whole life has been structured around winning the “get accepted by a big name university” game. 

Now this may not be true for all who read this, but from my life experience, it would be hard to deny this fact. All my extracurricular activities, the classes I took, the reason why my parents moved to Naperville and pushed me in the way that they have: My parents did it all so that they could give me the best chance to go to the best university, the first step of securing a better future. Now while this is very admirable on the behalf of my parents, it does not take away from the rather sad reality that everything I do with my time is not based on whether I want to or not. It’s a matter of whether it is worth my time doing a certain activity at the expense of doing something else that could look better on a college application. 

 

Perhaps it’s a product of the hypercompetitive environment that I was raised in with my parents wanting me to be just as high achieving as those around me. Perhaps it’s a result of kids who founded businesses at 13 or created nuclear reactors in their garage getting into MIT or Harvard which pushed a narrative of needing to be insanely intelligent to have a chance of getting into a hyper selective university. Perhaps it’s a result of these big name universities feeding into a marketing strategy that preys on the weak, feeble, and incredibly stressed out minds of adolescents and their parents while simultaneously rejecting thousands of applicants to give the aura of “prestige”. Or maybe it’s a combination of all of those, along with a list of potentially hundreds of other reasons. 

 

Either way the reasons for why I (and many of my peers) have ended up in the situation of the present day doesn’t change the reality of what we are: rats in maze, begging to be picked by a hand that ultimately takes hundreds of thousands of dollars from us in exchange for an overpriced education and the “opportunity” to make important connections and potentially land a well paying job.

This may sound very tin-foil hat-like, and honestly it is. Regardless, it doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been a player in the game, I am still a player, and I won’t get to “leave” until I finally commit to a university. 

 

The decisions I have made, and still currently are making, are purely for the purpose of looking as good on an application and fluffing up my resume. But the fact that having a resume that looks like that of a working adult at 17 is expected is ridiculous. As for the essays, it would be a joke to think that what I have written in my college essays are honest and legit, written with any other intention than to get me into university.  

 

All those reasons, however, are nothing compared to the part I have the most issue with: I don’t even know what’s going to happen after I get into college. The deepest understanding of it that I have is that I go through schooling, hopefully apply for a bunch of jobs, maybe find one that accepts me and pays a decent amount of money, then work for the rest of my life. Maybe it’s because I’m the oldest child in my family and my parents are immigrants and that’s the only narrative I’ve been fed. Maybe it’s because I just don’t socialize enough. Maybe it’s because I just haven’t lived long enough or had enough experience, but the fact of the matter is that this has always been the path that I have been told to go down, and who am I to say no. 

Of course, universities being the businesses that they are, jump into this narrative, claiming their doors are the shining golden pathways to a better future, and perhaps they are. But whatever rational or promise of the future doesn’t help eb the absolute misery that is the College Application Process. 

 

Thank you for reading my uncalled for, very biased and childish rant. I need to go write more college essays, and I’m sure you do too. 

The Reader’s Journey

When I was young, reading was an integral part of my life. As the only form of entertainment that my parents allow me to have without restraint, I relied on the weekly stack of books that I would grab from the library to entertain myself for hours on end. I would shred through books on the recommended stands at the library, tear through the same volume of the only comic book that my parents would let me check out for the week, and annihilate the same poor copies of Percy Jackson or Harry Potter over and over again.

The books that I could read were gifts given to me from an unknown power. They saved me from my boredom and brought some sort of color into my life. To me, books were to be cherished.

That, however, was not the case for all the books I read. My dad, overly concerned by the “lack of challenging literature” that I was reading, decided to take matters into his own hands. In order to push me beyond just reading things that I liked for entertainment, he wanted me to read in order to educate myself. At first, they were simple books, ones that had won awards and were on the reading lists. Then, it was Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and a 700 page long book about the history of the entire world. 

 

 

I was in third grade at the time.

 

Trying to cobble together any sort of meaning from those books was challenging enough, but I also had to turn in hand written book reports summarizing what I had read (which was a disaster). I would turn in report after report, only to get them given back to me by my dad, along with an hour-long talk about why my writing was so bad and why I needed to write better. 

 

Through the rigorous (and very tiring) cycle of reading and writing my dad put me through, I became better at writing and more spread out in my reading.The exchange, however, was that the sanctuary I found in reading  soured very quickly. Reading had become a chore.  

 

Entering middle school, I no longer loved reading in the same way. The me of old was gone. I lost the speed and motivation to read in my free time. I no longer wished to explore at the library and look for different books to help entertain myself. While I would read the books my teachers asked us to read (and I still do to this day), it would be a momentous occasion for me to actually pick up and free read a book that wasn’t pushed onto me by someone else. 

 

Instead, I turned to something that historically had always given me joy: comics. More specifically, comics and manga. My shift away from actual hard cover books helped me find solace in the stories told by pictures and images (along with a couple of words). My speed and voracious appetite for stories were transferred into this new medium, and I managed to at least preserve my want to read.

Despite this new medium, I still found it difficult to return to physical, traditional books. I decided the best path forward for me was to simply take a break from reading physical books, and take a break I did. Years passed without me voluntarily picking up a book just to free read, and slowly but surely, I began to take an interest in books again. Titles I would hear from the grapevine, other pieces of media that had originated from books, covers that caught my eye when I went to the library; my curiosity returned. 

 

That curiosity however, was still just curiosity. I had still yet to pick up a book, and even though I wanted to, I was hesitant to start, but the allure of reading eventually got to me. A brightly colored novel with an interesting cover picture, the very definition of judging a book by its cover, sat on a shelf in the library, and pulled me back in. As I checked the book, I felt something that I had missed for so long: excitement. While the actual story of the book was completely forgettable, it was probably the most impactful book that I had read in ages, because it brought back my love for reading.

 

The me of old had finally returned.