If you look around even a little bit, you can pretty easily see the wide range of how people treat college admissions. Some people treat it like a time to finally get in the school where they can watch one of their favorite football teams. To others, it’s the sole arbiter of their future happiness in life. To some, college is a more relaxed progress that, while important, isn’t everything. To others, admissions are worth almost any price, including relationships with other people and even fellow Marksmen.
Personally, I’m somewhere in the middle, and no, I’m not just saying that to sound reasonable. The whole prospect of getting into college matters a good amount to me — after all, it does have a real effect on my future and how I’m going to live for the next four years at least, if not longer. I’ve also just been grinding too hard to drop the ball now and miss out on the potential I have.
But at the same time, it’s just the main priority. Not the only one. And it’s not to the point that I would let it affect my life the way it does for some people.
Firstly, I’ve already decided to not let my happiness depend on my results. Will I feel emotions about my results? For sure. But if I happened to get rejected from a school I want to go to, I’m not going be downcast and gloomy for a long time.
I’m also not going to let admissions mess with my relationships with others. A small number of people feel a need to be sneaky, to hide stuff from others or even do things as crazy as making conditional friendships partially based on college.
My friends are my friends, and they will continue to be after I leave this place. Now, will I still talk to all of them? Doubtful. And will I talk to them as much anymore? Almost certainly not. But I’m not going to sacrifice these relationships for the misguided hope that it will somehow help me get into a slightly better college.
And even from the perspective of purely just building up for the future, it’s important to remember that this is a key place to leave a legacy and build lasting relationships on its own — it’s not just the stepping stone to college. Connections at St. Mark’s could very well define your career, even more than your connections from college.
I’ve also decided that I’m not going to allow jealousy to affect me during this whole process. Comparison is the thief of joy, and this is extremely true when looking at everyone else’s admissions.
It helps to remember that at the end of the day, this is a pretty impersonal process that can sometimes screw you over through no fault of your own. And you can never know what a person did to achieve the result they did: you can’t judge them based on the very few things you know about them.
So those are the core tenets that I’m taking going forward. Obviously, this all is a bit easier said than done. I’ll have to see how I continue doing over these next few months, especially as the results come in.
But I think that, in some ways, it’s an exciting process. It’s an exciting time to go out and prove myself, validate the work I’ve been putting in and even to form a brotherly bond with my fellow Marksmen over the collective effort we’ve all put into this.
And, at the end of the day, almost everyone here will do well for themselves as long as they keep trying. When it comes to future satisfaction in life, there are far more important things to worry about, like relationships with friends. So now’s definitely not the time to sacrifice those or throw them away.
So as I grind out essays and the other things I need to finish up, I’m approaching it with a sense of calm and conviction that I’m not only presenting myself well to colleges, but that I’m approaching this whole process the right way. It really makes it all so much better and genuinely more enjoyable.