(The school having a prestigious name was not a criterion because I strongly believed then, and believe now, that it’s possible to find collegiate happiness any number of ways, in any number of places.) As College Search 2KChel progressed, I developed some criteria for my ideal college, which were that a) the school had to be in or near a city, but not completely integrated in (a la NYU) and b) there had to be an engineering or computer science program. Some of the schools I saw were more competitive than others. My dad and I would venture out casually on long weekends or during breaks. I did go visit a few more out-of-state schools-I’m from Maryland, and didn’t want to stay close to home-but we never structured trips like that again. My parents went on the walking tour without me. “We’re not in the middle of nowhere,” said my mom. “Fields with cows in them? I don’t want to go to school in the middle of nowhere.” “I think we passed fields back there,” I said. Take this example: by the time we wound our way down to Wesleyan, I flat out refused to go on the walking tour, although I was eventually persuaded to get out of the car to attend the info session. Your kids will temporarily hate you, they will barely remember the schools, and they’ll still give you a hard time about it six years later. Three days of back to back college tours is just too much. I’m unquestionably grateful that I have parents who cared enough about my education to take me around to schools like that, but here’s a note to all you other parents out there: do not do this. One school info session/tour in the morning, lunch break, one school info session/tour in the afternoon. That was something we all took way too seriously in my family.Ĭollege Search 2KChel kicked off with a three-day, six-school driving tour of schools of the Northeast, spring break of sophomore year of high school. Just shows you don’t need to go overboard to be accepted here.) I did know what I wanted out of a college experience, and I was also intensely familiar with how to approach college applications. Spoilers: he didn’t get in, but a bunch of other applicants, none of whom built a nuclear reactor, did. (The story about the applicant who built a fully functional nuclear reactor in his garage is worth a read. I knew it was-theoretically-possible that MIT would accept me, but MIT is a reach school for everyone and it’s difficult to anticipate what’ll happen when you apply, for better or for worse. I also felt unprepared to apply to MIT, but not because I’d had it hammered into my head by a counselor or a website that I wouldn’t be able to get in, just because you are never fully prepared to apply to MIT. All those internalized standards became a huge huge issue for me later on, which is another story altogether.) Ceri and Joel wrote great posts recently about feeling unprepared, or being told they were unprepared, to apply to MIT, which you should definitely check out. (A lot of it was unintentional, because I’d ingrained expectations from the cultural climate in which I grew up. Past me had also been unintentionally prepping for this process-the college application process in general-for a very, very long time. Past me was exuberant, but she is not very helpful to present me. The emails were instead titled things like, “Have a present – I am sleeping in ish” or, “Thingumagig” or, “It was proofread and everything!” or simply, “Oh Friend!” For another, I didn’t actually put “MIT” in the subjects or bodies of the emails with my essays attached, which were mostly sent to my dad so I could get a second opinion on what I’d written. They hadn’t survived the transfer to my most recent laptop and could only be found in my old Hotmail, for one thing. But it’s a little further away for me, so in the interest of research-and inspired by a bunch of other bloggers who’ve recently written about their own application experiences-I decided to look for the essays I actually wrote when I applied to MIT. The protagonist of ThesisNovel is a high school senior who’s just about to start the college application process, which might be an intensely familiar situation for some of you. (In my defense, the latte art deserved preservation.) To play to stereotype, I even Instagrammed my food. Hello Internet! I had a very writing major day, which is to say that I spent this morning sitting in 1369 Coffee on Mass Ave writing new scenes for ThesisNovel before I sent the first fifth of it off to my advisor.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |