College admissions....ughhh

What could you live without? 

I hate the words “interesting”, “passionate”, and “intrigued”. I’ve used them so much in my college essays that they all feel so outdated, debased, almost fake. 

I think I’m going into a curiosity crisis–I don’t feel interested in things. If you define interest as just the small spark of attraction you feel toward something, then I guess I do have some interest. But the magnitude and the duration of my curiosity have weirdly dropped. Though I've retained my enjoyment during classes, it’s been months since I have felt fully immersed in learning or chasing down a series of questions outside of school.

However, this is hardly surprising. Since August of 2023, I have been primarily working on my college essays outside of school and classes. I put off personal projects or self-studying because I almost felt “guilty” divesting time away from working toward a college admission decision that could significantly impact the next four years of my life. Even when I managed to create a pocket of time for these activities, the looming thoughts and stress from writing essays have made it hard to fully enjoy and engage in these activities, diminishing the genuine excitement for learning that I used to have. 

My symptoms are as follows: brain fog, physical exhaustion, depletion of mental energy/feeling like my neurons have degraded. Perhaps this is inevitable after all those hours thinking about my college essays--even during breaks or times I used to allocate for actually doing nothing--and leaving my brain no refuge from the countless "What significant challenges have I overcome in life?" or "Damn, what am I supposed to say to my future roommate? What makes me quirky?". And what's even more horrifying is that this is not the end. Yes, we've got two more months to go until that January 1st deadline. Woohoo!

Perhaps it is this five-month (or seven, or eight-month) marathon primarily spanning August to the end of December, with every month juicing out the souls and creativities from our brains, that causes senioritis.

What a waste--of energy, mental health, and TIME--in our last year of high school, the year before we might leave the nests of our households toward some distant college to get our footholds in the real world. All the time with family, and friends, the time to explore and try to figure out what we actually want to do with our lives.

I'm not saying that college is not worth it, or that we should abolish the college admission system altogether. I think it's important to strive to place ourselves in the best possible environment for the next four years of our lives. But honestly, I think it is just so overrated how much time, effort, and (for some people) money we invest into college admissions.

To ease some of the pressure, I would tell myself things like, Come on, it's still just a school! No matter if I go to Stanford, the University of Washington, or UIUC, my success only depends on what I make of whatever environment I'm placed in.

Despite knowing these things to be true (I've had SO many people from various universities assuring me of this), it's still difficult to fully internalize and act upon them, to put down the obsession to write the perfect essays or get myself out of the loops of self-doubt over my chance of admission to a specific college.

Maybe it's the parental pressure. Maybe it's a part of being an immigrant. Maybe it's just the societal notion of success that has been so deeply engrained inside my mind that not even conscious effort can fully erase it. But one idea that really burns in my heart is this: something must change about college admissions. I really don't want my future children to have to go through this.