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Health & Fitness

In Limbo and Muting the 'College Confidential' Chatter

This article could be alternatively titled: "What I Learned While Fidgeting in the Waiting Room They Call Senior Year" or "A High School Senior's Perspective on College, Pre-Acceptance"

I’ve always found the concept of the waiting room vaguely disturbing. I understand that doctors and dentists, such accommodating professionals, have schedules that are in constant flux throughout the day, and therefore cannot give each patient an exact time at which he or she must report. This model works quite well, if the wait time remains under or around fifteen minutes, but once the clock strikes the end of the average television program a strange phenomenon called boredom sets in. Somewhat suddenly, the Glade plug-in air freshener goes from sweet to sickly, the blue pleather seats begin to adhere to sweaty legs, the pastel wallpaper no longer seems soothing but frustratingly fluctuating between off-white and true yellow, and the television that’s hung at a now awkwardly high angle is showing Weather Channel footage of the cloudless sky that lies just beyond the dusty metal blinds of the one window in the dim holding area. Now imagine being trapped in this bland beige inferno for not thirty minutes but three months--alternatively known by college-bound high school seniors as January through April.

Admittedly, I cannot speak for all my peers, or even most. Many already know where they will spend the next four years, thanks to an Early acceptance, and others might not feel as strongly as I do about the mind-warping power vacuum (a gaping hole that gets filled with introspection) that the green “completed” triangles next to all Common Application produce. Likewise, I should state right away that I was deferred Early Action and will not pretend that my deferral has not contributed to my opinions today. I’m sure that if I read this article as a junior, I would have instantly balked at its veracity upon learning that its author is someone for whom the college process did not turn out ideally. Thanks you guys, Class of 2014, for making the same condemnation after reading what I have just shared, but you might want to stick around for just a few more paragraphs. As your college fevers spike to an all-time high with March SATs just behind and the most pressing round of APs still before you, I feel obligated to explain how just one year from now it’s possible your perspective will pivot from where it is now to where mine now rests.

First, I cannot stress enough how awful it is to ask a high school senior, especially in the January to April time frame of waiting, about college and his/her future plans are, career-related and otherwise. Really it is pretty much the equivalent of a stranger (or, even worse, a friend) asking a young couple who’ve been dating for a few weeks when they’re going to going to “pop one out” (or, even worse, “put a bun in the oven”). Just as two people who have known each other for fewer than three digits of days probably won’t know whether they’ll still be together once they hit the big 100, so high school seniors, between January and April, don’t know what their next four years will look like because they literally could not tell you if they wanted to.

As I have fended off--more like swatted away--these countless good-intentioned inquiries about my personal goals, I’ve had to try hard not to loudly and invariably shout out at those who ask: “You try to remember what it was to be seventeen! And then on top of that, to be seventeen today, in this privileged community! It means you have to factor in the psycho, Internet-aided college admissions bender into which the overachieving teens and especially their overachieving parents--who are trying to fulfill their megalomaniac, misdirected fantasies of success vicariously through a poisonous stranglehold on the futures of their progeny--have readily bought! Just go stalk the Chance Me Please threads on College Confidential and the horrific truth of what we have become will hit you harder than a stack of SAT prep books.” However, I generally restrain myself from unleashing the full brunt of my frustration with the insanity of what college has come to mean in privileged suburban America because if I didn’t I would have to go back, long before this winter, to give some context to my current views.

I don’t know when or how the authors and screenwriters of the United States came to this agreement, but I do know that there must be some secret covenant between the tween and teen pop culture producers of the nation to only enroll their characters at the most prestigious universities in the Union. Obviously, part of the reasoning could be attributed to the name recognition certain Ivies and their equivalents have with the general, and even fairly young, public. Additionally, some would counter my point by saying that having a character attend a prestigious school stems from the same logic of constructing allure as only using very attractive people on screen. Regardless, the way writers hand out college acceptances to their characters sets many bright students on a path to college obsession from a young age.

Disney may very well be the poster-child of this “competitive colleges for all likeable characters” mantra, for in 2008, High School Musical 3: Senior Year revealed that two characters would be attending Juilliard, one UC Berkeley (Troy, male lead), one Stanford (Gabriella, female lead), and another Yale. Then in 2011--and I cannot be the only one of my contemporaries who did--I watched the Hannah Montana Series finale, in which the central conflict consists of Miley Stewart  (To refresh our memories as two years of pop culture is at least a decade in real time, Miley is also Hannah Montana, a teen pop star who has been living undercover as a normal high school girl, or Miley.) deciding between attending Stanford with her best friend and filming a blockbuster movie in Europe. Aside from not even slightly buying into that plot-line, I had to admit that even then I felt a bit horrified that mainstream culture would start trying to sell the supposed importance of name recognition to a fairly young target audience.

Other examples of this not-so-subtle college brainwashing come through targeting a more high school aged audience. In Gossip Girl, though for that privileged Upper East Side set it may be fairly true to reality, main characters go off to Columbia, Yale, and Brown. In Skins, the British series that stirs much controversy stateside, two of the main characters in the second series randomly end up at Harvard. In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a recent book turned movie, yet another main character ends up wearing Crimson. Fiction is indeed fiction, but at some point, a common, benign trope like “Ivies for all” can cross over to reality, infecting the minds of real teens.

In no way am I saying that television alone is causing the great disillusionment of my generation, but it helps set a certain base note with which the real world quickly harmonizes. As I mentioned earlier, College Confidential is one such contagious festering sore in the larger epidemic. For those who don’t know, College Confidential is an online forum that allows users to create accounts and then threads of questions and answers about all things college. The topics range from Official X University Regular Decision Thread (where a few anxious seniors post obsessively about any and all hearsay concerning release dates and times of admissions decisions) to Does Y School Have Z Major? (generally a thread that results in know-it-all style answers that tend to be incomplete) to my personal favorite, Chance Me Please!?! :* ;).

Though I added the kissy and winky faces, respectively, to that title for dramatic effect, I believe they really enrich one’s understanding of the tone of those extra special College Confidential discussions. “Chance Me Please” is where an overeager high school student posts his or her stats and asks other CC contributors to size him or her up, giving an estimation of his/her likelihood of admission at a smattering of upper echelon (based only on the criteria of low admit rates) schools. I used to read Chance Me Please threads when I was a junior and even a sophomore. Without exaggeration, it is the psychological equivalent of someone posting a picture of him or herself and asking where he/she ranks on a scale of attractiveness, 10 being highest and 1 lowest.

College Confidential becomes even more impressive when one starts paying attention to the contributors themselves. After reading a few discussion boards, the slow, sickening truth becomes more than apparent: all those posters who are referring to “my D” or “my S” are parents. D is for daughter, S is for son. Aside from the fact that using D and S as stand-ins for your children’s names makes them sound more like a nineteenth century mistress to whom you write monthly love sonnets than your child who (though maybe this is jumping to conclusions) has a name, the creepiest part is these people are not just current parents. They are often parents whose children were accepted to college years ago.

(As a side note, please, to all the juniors, if you spend more time reading College Confidential thread than doing what you are supposed to do online as a teen--Facebook stalking cute boys/girls--remember that College Confidential’s authority is only as great as you are willing to accept. Take every single post on that site with a gargantuan block of salt.)

I warn about College Confidential because I am a recently recovered addict. As I read the stats of accepted/deferred/rejected students from previous years and encountered profiles of accepted students, who seemed less impressive than myself, I often felt some invisible finger poke the sadistic pleasure center of the mind, injecting liquid confidence into my bloodstream. Sizing myself up against strangers, even on my own slanted mental playing field, and winning gave me the jitter-y rush of a cup of over-sugared espresso laced with cocaine. So when one day, a good friend and I were browsing through YouTube and happened upon a series of webisodes for a show called “Ivy Dreams” I gleefully watched the whole series, mentally noting how much stronger of an applicant I was compared to the poor kids whose HYPSM (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT) hopes were slowly shrinking away in front of the camera as each new rejection letter came and went into a growing pile.

Now as I tap my foot against the faux-wood baseboard of the sticky pleather bench and debate internally which crinkled magazine I should pick off the coffee table, I wish that when I was grinning at the shattering of Ivy Dreams, one of the kids from the video had just broken the fourth wall and told me frankly:

“You are not the exception, you are the rule. I used to think like you but then I went through the process myself. Now I know that just because you are you does not mean an admissions committee will consider you more than anyone else. Not being accepted is an option and is more likely than you presently realize. But not being accepted doesn’t mean failure; you don’t yet know the definitions of success and failure. You have no idea that neither has anything to do with a college decision. And you, my friend, are going to have to see two girls, who are better students than you, be deferred from the same college as you are to fully understand that.”

I guess that all sounds a bit unbelievable when placed in the mouth of some random stranger, who should have hypothetically spoken out to me through some YouTube series that was recorded years earlier, so alright, you got me! I know it probably comes as a shock but those are actually just my own words, ones I wish I’d know I’d had last year when I was still playing the game. Thinking--I guess that is one of the perks of being stuck in reception, tapping my foot and waiting for my future.

I see the magazines laid out before me on the table. I have many choices: Parenting, The New York Times Magazine, People, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, Cosmo, The Economist, Bon Appetit, and so on. If I’d walked in last year, I’d probably have felt obligated to pick up one of the “smart” periodicals (Economist, NYT, or New Yorker) but now I pick up whichever seems most interesting. Today that’s Bon Appetit, with an enticing front cover blurb about a recipe that I’d love to try. I mean, now that I don’t need to be the application anymore, I can just be who I am--guilt free like the brownies I am choosing to read about in one of the “fluff” magazines.

For as terrifying and existential-crisis causing as the limbo here is, I feel free. I feel very lost but very liberated. Anyway, only in feeling lost can one really figure out how to make sense of it all. Before, applying to college was the top priority behind maintaining my academic record. Up until all my college applications were in, I had this big purpose, this overarching theme, this goal, but now as it’s out of my hands, passed behind the reception desk as I wait for it to emerge and call my name. Without the specific concept of “well, yes, next year I am going to X school to do Y,” though some might know, the rest of us are consequently in this transient and anxiety-inducing but nevertheless blissful state of self-awareness to the point of self-empowerment. In this limbo period I’ve gotten to flip through my “fluff” magazines and re-appraise the value of passions I’ve hidden for so long just because they didn’t check a box on the Common App. As I’ve waited, I’ve even flipped through the piles of catalogs next to the periodicals, seeing all the beautiful things outside of acceptance letters and realizing they are mine to have, if I work for them.

As I realize how much I prefer reading articles about baking to those about “intelligent” subjects,  a thought floats about: why do we insist on lying to ourselves? As high school students, we are already so much in denial, which can’t be healthy considering most of the adult American population practically lives in that Egyptian river. We deny that we are overloading ourselves to impress an admissions committee. (If you are a junior who gets competitive in the classroom, I can one hundred percent guarantee that you will not believe what you’ve just read.) We hide our dislike of some more noble subject areas and our love for the trivial, elective passions of our life. (Mine are baking, television, writing, and art.) We pretend that we are not comparing ourselves to our peers and that scores, grades, and awards do not matter. (But really, on the inside, those who use the meritocratic metric know all too well that those quantities totally define our perception of everyone around us and of ourselves.) We tell everyone that we are totally prepared for rejection when we secretly believe that we are exempt from the reality of the randomness of college admissions. (After all, you are not me. You, junior who might be reading this, still have a bright expanse of possibility ahead, and you surely know how to handle it better than I do. Because, again, you are you. You are undoubtedly different and special. Because you are not me.)

I finish my article and suddenly another wonderful idea breaks through the ambient phone-ringing, children-whining, copier-running, noise: no one ever said that college was it--that it was the end goal. Yet I know that is how I’ve felt for the past thirteen years. However, having time to reflect as I wait out the first chunk of second semester in uncertainty, I now understand that regardless of the outcome in terms of admissions decisions ultimately all college does is give me another four years of education. I don’t want to demean the achievement of getting there; going to college is an incredible achievement that we should never stop praising. I just see more clearly that the name of the place is hardly going to matter because wherever I go, I can still have the same goals. Not knowing where my future will take me physically has forced me to reflect on my interests and ideals more than any career identification quiz that one completes in an eighth grade guidance counselor session ever did. I know I have no control over where I am accepted, so I feel empowered and able to enumerate my hopes and dreams for life after diplomas.

As I’ve sat in the waiting room, I’ve jotted down these realizations into some simple advice for everyone who hasn’t yet been through the admissions process: don’t give up on your dreams. Don’t give up on your incredibly ambitious college aspirations. Apply to all the reach schools you want because you very well may get in. (One of my closest friends, a thoroughly “normal” guy, did really get into Harvard.) Chase the rigorous schools and give your absolute best effort on every application. Keep your list ambitious. However, add something to that list for me, will you? Just scrawl it on right after the last college:

Add some new dreams.


By my judgement, I’ve still got about two and a half more weeks until a college calls my name. At least now I’m uncomfortable from something other than boredom: I’m itching to get out to the real world and unleash my newly uninhibited passions towards some non-college achievements.

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