On College
(Part 1 of a series dedicated to documenting my feelings towards this college process).
(Ideally, read this if you are a junior/senior in high school in preparation for college applications.)
The punch line is it's all a dice roll. As raxd noted, "Everything in life is a gamble." And in the case of colleges, some gambles are better than others.
So overall, I would recommend you sit back, relax, and simply relax. The way it's framed in my mind, college is important -- but each college itself is a dice roll. Sure, elite schools like MIT are amazing and each can open up new doors, but MIT isn't for everyone. Not in an exclusionary way, but rather, from person to person, we all vibe at different places better -- maybe you like very close friends and a small quaint college town; or maybe you like partying and knowing a lot of people -- college is a social activity for you. Whichever you resonate with more, it's still not guaranteed that you'll have a good time with college.
So sit back, relax, and spin the roulette wheel.
With that depressing overview in mind, here are a few tips from me, a good student1.
Don't trust all advice. Only take the advice that works for you. Perhaps, if you're "blind," any advice is good advice; but as you learn more, don't blindly follow.
The roots for this argument come from the fact that everyone is pointing everywhich direction on every topic relating to the college roulette spin. Everyone's got advice to share, but you (the reader) are not them -- they're trying to distribute advice that worked for them2, and what works/worked for them may not work for you. Thus, don't blindly follow advice -- if the advice works, great! Otherwise, it may be better to drop it.Write at night. When I was a junior, one of my older (senior) friends remarked that his writing process was to stay up until 12-12:30 until the "real thoughts" came along, write those down, then wake up the next day and decide if what was written was genius or garbage. I followed this advice, and I think writing went well3.
The prerequisites to what I just said are mainly to be good at writing and to like writing. Well you don't even need that first one. But you need to be prepared to write, prepared to criticize your writing, and prepared to struggle.
It's also helpful to get an outside editor. Me personally, I edited most of my essays myself, and only on a few (~5%?) of my essays, I actually got a qualified editor (friend) to look over it. But that leads into my next point....Don't go through many versions.4 I don't know about you, but I hate editing. If you're on like v7 of the same essay and using the same topic and structure, I would say just go rewrite it -- you can still use that same topic, but with a rewrite, your mind can start over "fresh."
Make a campaign map.5 Don't borrow someone else's, make your own. The map should function as sort of a "todo list" -- a way to make sure everything gets done, and so work doesn't pile up tremendously. Below is my campaign map for my October Campaign.6
As you can see, it's messy, it's distraught, it has a plan, and it's uniquely mine. As Znosko-Borovsky said7, "It is not a move, even the best move, that you must seek, but a realizable plan."
- College is a business. Why did this college raise tuition? Why are these classes being cut? Why does this this this college advertise a "0.1-1" student to faculty ratio? It's all about business. And you're the damn consumer. So from consumer to consumer, I would urge you to be wary and be prudent. It's so easy to believe, but at the end of the day, if I'm shelling out 5-6 figures, I better make damn sure that I get a good deal.
It's not late enough at night, so I can't think of any more tips. Bottom line is go do your own research, and I hope that what I've written here has provided you with some things you haven't thought of.
If you want some more advice or whatever (and I know you to some degree -- whether that be from online stuff or from school), feel free to send me an email with some more questions (thelonewolf.bearblog@gmail.com).8
I am (was?) a good student -- I can control myself (mostly), I have good grades, and a defining feature of me is my individuality -- the fact that I steer my own ship and I do so even when it's unpopular. With that said, you are definitely not me, so take all my advice with a grain of salt.↩
Or give advice to a whole group of students↩
Decisions aren't out. Also, there's no way of knowing "how much" my essays were valued -- were they distinguishing? or did they simply show english competence?↩
I will most probably write an essay on how to write essays.↩
I will probably not write an essay delving into this. All you need to know is first you list out your work, and second you delegate. Leave some space in between days, but at the same time, don't spend an obscene amount of time -- a long military campaign is always very, very taxing and energy sapping. After you've done that, make sure to not lose sight of the overall picture; I used a simple sheet of paper because I like simplicity and the rawness of paper, and if you use some really fancy Notion hooked up to Google Docs and Obsidian that's connected to your Apple Notes that's then linked to a MySpace account where you connect with other college people, that might be too much. The goal of the map is to map our where you are and where you need to be, not to be fancy.↩
In a chess context. I like chess.↩
(Time for some meta-writing woohoo!) One thing that I put emphasis on is rhetoric. In the case of this post, while there is no fundamental difference between my "campaign map" and a calendar and the "roulette spin"/"dice roll" of college admissions and the inherent volatility in admissions, rhetoric is a very useful way to get you to frame things in your mind. In this way, the rhetoric (words) I use try to capture the absurdity, inconsequentiality, and randomness that plagues the "meritocracy" of college admissions. Meritocracy is in quotes here not because the meritocracy aspect is gone, but rather that it's not all meritocracy -- there's a good deal of random chance involved anyways.↩