College applications are weird. I would say they are around 30% stressful, 30% fun, and 50% staring into space and wondering where the extra 10% in life comes from.
Some prompts are traditional interview questions, asking you to display qualities of leadership, endurance, and compassion. Other ones try to tailor more towards the “young and hip” generation, with prompts such as “Where is Waldo?”
I don’t have a very good sense of how to present myself as an ideal college student at blank blank university. For now, I’ll continue to ramble awkwardly about myself in my essays. Sort of like this blog.
College essays give me the convoluted vibe of trying to justify why I belong at blank blank institution, when I don’t even really know myself why I want to be there. They ask about your PASSIONS in life, and you write honestly about your interests, while wondering whether it is something you really want to be doing in ten years. In trying to apply to colleges, I feel like I am creating a character who is QUIRKY but also has a sense of DIRECTION in life (but taking detours are encouraged, as we are just teenagers right?).
The more I self-reflect and attempt to answer a multitude of variations on “tell me about yourself in 250 words or less :))”, the more I feel like I’m questioning who I am in the first place. I don’t really know what I want to do in life or college, but writing these darn essays will sure convince me of an answer!
In essence, I’ll try my best to convey myself as a full person, complete with strengths (empathy, eating nutella) and weaknesses (cynicism, asking for help). If colleges don’t want the entire me, I might as well stay in the comfort of my home eating nutella and executing my plan for world domination (joke).
It may seem that I am nervous or salty about the college application process, and I’m not going to deny that. On the flip side, it feels quite therapeutic to be torturing myself with these soul searching questions that
I rarely take time to think about. Thoughts like “is there really enough compassion in the world” or “does this matter in the grand scheme of things” either begin to haunt, or motivate me to actually do something. I’m leaning towards the latter.
A college interviewer guy gave me some reassuring advice that the major you select or even the field you enter doesn’t dictate your career path. What matters is finding the intersection of your skill set (learned) and your characteristics (internal) to find a little niche on this planet.
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In other news, I spent four hours today at the local Art and Wine festival ensuring the future of our environment (also known as sorting debris into TRASH, RECYCLING, and COMPOST). I must have said, “that is compostable!!” around a thousand times, but tipsy adults and environmentally conscious kids don’t make the most effective combination.
ALSO, I went to this robotics workshop on machine learning and building neural networks, which was super cool. Unfortunately, computers will not be thinking for us anytime soon; they simply are good at performing mundane number crunching on a whole lot of data to find patterns that may or may not exist. (Hence this funny comic!)
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| source: xkcd.com |