College admissions... again
Whenever a writer documents a high-achieving student’s pressure-ridden journey to getting into college, that student is invariably described as some combination of class president, talented writer, math whiz, and sports star. For many a current high school student, this is cause for some anxiety about one’s own qualifications.
On the flip side, it seems that modern college admissions theorists hold that applicants should show a single “passion” — something in which he or she has long been involved, preferably since in the womb.
What college-frenzied students read into either of these schools of thought, however, tends to be overdramatic and overblown. If you find it unreasonable to have singled out a passion so early in life, it is no more reasonable to have cursory involvement in a myriad of activities. Likewise, having only one pursuit is not the only alternative to spreading yourself thin.
The reality is that no matter how you approach the game of college admission, the admissions officers can only see the fragments of your life that fit into the various documents they look over. Were 50 hours of volunteer work a result of your parents’ forced labor, or did you organize and run your own project?
This suggests a natural alternative to planning one’s endeavors so as to maximize the degree to which they will impress the gatekeepers to top colleges. Instead of asking what colleges will think in one or two years, ask yourself: What will I think in one or two years?
If you can look back and say that the experience taught you something, then you have nothing to lose.
It is easy to rationalize spending meaningless hours for the sake of college, perhaps grinding out 20 or 30 extra SAT points. After all, from the perspective of the high school student, getting into the right college seems to leave you set for life. It is ironically reassuring, however, that there’s no conversion scale from what you do to college admission.
— Alex Zhai