As winter creeps upon us(Snow in October?), I finally feel a great sense of relief. A process that took me a great number of weeks has finally ended: I have officially applied to college. Indeed, many people still feel anxious, nervous, and just plain sick even after their apps have been submitted. They will sit, waiting for that letter to arrive telling that they have gotten in to the school of their dreams. Or, more likely, they will pace around in circles until they feel sick, repeatedly going through mental scenarios in their head, trying to figure out the much feared “worst case scenario”. Normally, it goes something like this:
“There’s no way I’m getting in. I’m not even that smart. There’s no point.”
A few moments later
“Well, it’s ok. I can just got to community college if I don’t get in…those schools let everyone in. I’ll just transfer after I go there for a year or two. Everything will be fine.”
So, it’s not hard to see how silly all of these thoughts are when they are written out like I have done above. The thoughts that creep around in our head are usually pretty insane—like super nutty. But we fail to question them when we are in a state of complete panic. It’s as if the logical part of our minds just shut themselves down in the face of what we consider to be a “major crisis”. Whatever the case may be, this type of thinking is dangerous. I can say through both personal experience, and through direction observation of my close friends, that getting stressed out only leads to the inevitable nervous breakdown. In one of my previous scribbling here on the site, I believe I talked about how we always seem to be teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. In some ways, this can be a great tool for motivation, but it can manifest into something very debilitating when you take it to the extreme. I survived the college application process through exploring my own personal philosophy, reading books about people having similar apprehensions, and a good amount of unadulterated panic attacks. It was not until after I submitted my apps that I developed the foresight to see just how silly I had been acting. Emotions are strange things sometimes.
Now that I’ve applied, I sometimes ask myself, “What’s next?”. It’s a valid question. After all, there is a very distinct possibility that I won’t get into my top choice school, or even my second choice school. What happens then? Well, I’ve come to realize that these questions accomplish nothing besides make me want to pie myself in the face. The only thing that I can do is believe that not getting into a top choice school is not the end of the world, as it were. Being sucked into the mass hysteria that seems to define any high school senior is silly and without purpose. I like to think of the opening lines of howl when I picture the madness of my peers: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”. In this case, the madness is applying to college. All of this seems to leads us to one other question: What causes all of this hysteria around applying to college?
If I were to answer this question honestly, I’m afraid I would get a lot of flak for not being politically correct. My honest answer—which I will be so bold as to put down in writing—is that smug, anal retentive parents make this process hell. While they are not the sole cause of this stress, parents who want to relive their childhood vicariously through their children are the chief source of problems. Many of us would like to believe that such is not the case, but I’m afraid it is the truth. Parents want their children to be better than their friend’s children. It’s pure competition. Wars are going on in Suburbia—a form of warfare in which parents try to inflate their ego through the academic success of their offspring. (This all sounds rather cynical, but I’m afraid you must admit that there is at least some truth in it.)
` To be fair, there are also a number of other factors that contribute to the mass hysteria that surrounds applying to college. For instance, many students feel the need to elevate their peer’s level of stress by incessantly talking about every aspect of college. Every social function becomes a place to talk about the common app, tuition, prestige, or SAT scores. One starts to feel sick after this constant discussion which, in reality, is anxiety couched in egomania. It’s almost as if some terrible sickness begins to spread, catching nearly every student applying to college. But indeed, we manage to deal with it. To be polite and genial it is necessary to listen to everyone moan and groan about their college application process. We are expected to empathize and be nothing but polite. It’s a tough life we all live—the horror of applying to college. The abominable first-world problems we all must face every single day. When will this madness end?
We know we have lost it when we begin to think like this.
