Fun Fact about Greg: It is his life goal to watch a Major League Baseball game in every stadium
An End to College Brochures
March 15, 2006
Starting about half way through my junior year, and lasting up until last month, I came home to find countless pieces of mail from different colleges every day. Before I had any idea what kind of school I wanted to go to, I would read every piece of literature that was sent my way, but it didn't take long before I started to get tired of every college claiming to have the best opportunities and environment available for me.
Soon schools found out my email address and started flooding me with more and more advertisements. For me, none of the information ever really took root. Everybody claimed to have world-class faculty, small class sizes, a beautiful campus, great internship opportunities, and large amounts of financial aid. Basically, each college claimed to be the best. Of course there were also the extremely prestigious colleges (like Harvard) that would lie and say I was the type of student they were looking for even though I stood about an iceberg's chance in hell of being accepted.
It was for this reason that when I actually got around to starting my college search, I took the initiative to do research on my own instead of trusting everything that all these universities sent me in the mail. It was through this investigation and through campus visits that I was finally able to narrow my choices down to the seven schools that I applied to.
Now, though, as I don't come home to find a pile of college mail waiting for me, I realize that this represents the end of an era in my life. At the beginning of high school, I worked hard to get to the point where colleges would start sending me those brochures. After I started receiving them, I kept working hard so I would have a better chance of gaining admission to some of those schools. Now that I've been accepted to five institutions and wait to hear from two more, I miss that same college mail that used to annoy me so much.
While I have pretty much decided where I'll be going to school next year, I still enjoy those frequent calls and brochures from the other colleges I applied to. I think it is a fitting reward that after going through three years of brutal schooling to try to get these colleges to accept me, they are now trying to get me to accept them as my home for the next four years. They'll have students and admissions counselors call me to see if I have any questions, or they'll send me extremely detailed packets of information about different programs and why they would be a great fit for me. It wouldn't hurt for them to start sending money my way, too?
In all seriousness, though, I am sad to see my college process wind down to a close. I've put so much time and effort into everything that is a part of it that it will be tough to send my deposit into one school and close out my high school life. But I guess everything has to end at some point, and for me the last chapter of my college process is coming to a close.