Who cares?
While listening to Def Leppard and reading Sarah’s column this morning, it hit me: the ultimate way to avoid college application stress. With my method in hand, I am officially prepared to avoid stressing out about where I’m going to go to college.
How do I plan to achieve this, you ask? It’s actually quite simple. I just decided that I really, really don’t care. Why should I care about whether or not some magazine calls such-and-such school the best ever? For all I know, the people who write US News & World Report are on drugs and just randomly put down colleges and call them “the best.”
While complete apathy isn’t really an option, I’m going to come as close to it as possible. Am I going to take 30 APs? Forget about it. Apply to 18 schools, maybe? Nope. Not for me.
While I do plan on applying to around 12 colleges, I only know of one that is considered “prestigious” that I’m going to apply to (University of Virginia), and I’m not going to bother with Ivy League schools. I used to want to apply to Yale, but that has long since passed. The more I thought about my visit, the less I actually thought I could see myself there.
So here’s what I think everybody should do until we get accepted to college: find a certain amount of time every week when we can be completely apathetic and not care about anything. And I mean ANYTHING! Complete absence of thought is good for recharging the body and mind. We should practice it more often.
—Carl Zielinski