College-bound, but Forging My Own Path
By Samuel Hyland
Staff writer
I’ve seen it for myself. Anxious and fretting, a college applicant—a high school senior who’s related to me—ran down a flight of stairs, flung open the front door and searched the mailbox for an important letter about where she’d spend the next four years of her academic life.
The letter didn’t bring the news she wanted. One of her top picks of potential colleges didn’t pick her.
Plenty of college hopefuls have shared her disappointment. Truth is, a whole lot of us college hopefuls feel so much pressure. We are undone when a favorite college rejects us. All that time we invested? It got thrown back into our faces. We wonder whether all that studying, all that prepping, all those pre-college camps for highly competitive kids made any difference at all.
I’m one of those highly competitive kids. Yet, I’m also trying to be easy with myself.
I was a smart, nerdy black sixth-grader. Once, I heard some hecklers—adults who looked like college dropouts, with lit cigarettes hanging off their lips—refer to white students who were passing by as “preppy.” I thought that the word defined a style, that it meant designer polo shirts, loafers and starched knee-length shorts. I started calling those kind of white students “preppy” myself.
Until “preppy” took on a different meaning for me. By the time I got to my high school, preppy tended to mean playing certain sports, joining certain clubs and, in various other ways, broadening yourself. It meant filling out a resúme that would make you—if you happen to attend a high school like mine, full of anxious, fretful, competitive kids—look good to admissions officers at elite universities.
“Colleges want the well-rounded applicant,” teachers have constantly told my classmates and me.
My dream has been to just be a writer. But as I heard “well-rounded” so frequently, I felt the pressure to multi-task, turn myself into a varsity athlete, a club leader, a prodigy in multiple fields. Is that who colleges want?
If, as we’re also told, college admissions officers are now widening their lens—focusing on character, aspirations, economic, racial and class diversity and such, as much as on SAT scores or GPAs—does that ease some of the pressure?
Is this whole college conundrum easier for us than for our parents who went to college (and not all of our parents made it that far)?
You cannot predict whether a college student will succeed based entirely on what they did in high school. I believe that, as we college applicants mature, we will follow fewer of other people’s and systems’ prescriptions and directions. As we truly mature, we will begin to forge our own paths.
We will start to know that one college’s rejection letter doesn’t have to reduce us to tears. One letter doesn’t mean we’re less than. We are, in fact, good enough when we are an authentic version of ourselves, doing our very best to be our very best.
So, in a year or so, I also will dash down the stairs one morning. I will fling open my front door. I will search my mailbox for a sign of what my academic future may hold. But, I won’t let one letter break me.
Commentary
College-bound, but Forging My Own Path
By Samuel Hyland
Staff writer
I’ve seen it for myself. Anxious and fretting, a college applicant—a high school senior who’s related to me—ran down a flight of stairs, flung open the front door and searched the mailbox for an important letter about where she’d spend the next four years of her academic life.
The letter didn’t bring the news she wanted. One of her top picks of potential colleges didn’t pick her.
Plenty of college hopefuls have shared her disappointment. Truth is, a whole lot of us college hopefuls feel so much pressure. We are undone when a favorite college rejects us. All that time we invested? It got thrown back into our faces. We wonder whether all that studying, all that prepping, all those pre-college camps for highly competitive kids made any difference at all.
I’m one of those highly competitive kids. Yet, I’m also trying to be easy with myself.
I was a smart, nerdy black sixth-grader. Once, I heard some hecklers—adults who looked like college dropouts, with lit cigarettes hanging off their lips—refer to white students who were passing by as “preppy.” I thought that the word defined a style, that it meant designer polo shirts, loafers and starched knee-length shorts. I started calling those kind of white students “preppy” myself.
Until “preppy” took on a different meaning for me. By the time I got to my high school, preppy tended to mean playing certain sports, joining certain clubs and, in various other ways, broadening yourself. It meant filling out a resúme that would make you—if you happen to attend a high school like mine, full of anxious, fretful, competitive kids—look good to admissions officers at elite universities.
“Colleges want the well-rounded applicant,” teachers have constantly told my classmates and me.
My dream has been to just be a writer. But as I heard “well-rounded” so frequently, I felt the pressure to multi-task, turn myself into a varsity athlete, a club leader, a prodigy in multiple fields. Is that who colleges want?
If, as we’re also told, college admissions officers are now widening their lens—focusing on character, aspirations, economic, racial and class diversity and such, as much as on SAT scores or GPAs—does that ease some of the pressure?
Is this whole college conundrum easier for us than for our parents who went to college (and not all of our parents made it that far)?
You cannot predict whether a college student will succeed based entirely on what they did in high school. I believe that, as we college applicants mature, we will follow fewer of other people’s and systems’ prescriptions and directions. As we truly mature, we will begin to forge our own paths.
We will start to know that one college’s rejection letter doesn’t have to reduce us to tears. One letter doesn’t mean we’re less than. We are, in fact, good enough when we are an authentic version of ourselves, doing our very best to be our very best.
So, in a year or so, I also will dash down the stairs one morning. I will fling open my front door. I will search my mailbox for a sign of what my academic future may hold. But, I won’t let one letter break me.