No matter how much I try to avoid thinking about college, someone always seems to bring it up. Now, in the second semester of my junior year, I finally had to meet my college counselor. Up until this point, the main focus had been on the senior class. Now that most of the seniors have picked out their colleges and are just waiting anxiously for their acceptance letters, the focus has shifted toward the junior class. We had our first college counseling meeting last week to determine our small groups and find out who our counselors are. We were split into groups of about 7 students to talk about our feelings and get to know more about the college process. At the first meeting, my counselor mainly asked us what types of careers we want to pursue, what types of colleges we are looking for, and what our interests are. He told us that we need to be building strong relationships with our teachers, so they can write our college recommendations. And to think, I thought grades and extracurricular activities were all a student needed to get into college. It turns out there are so many more behind-the-scenes aspects to the college process.
Our school is having a parent-student meeting in February. The school sent home a letter to my parents basically asking them to praise me as much as possible. This praise letter will help the college counselors write my college recommendation letter. The whole process seems so contrived because, honestly, what kind of parents are not going to give their child the most incredible recommendation letter, maybe even exaggerating a little? The recommendations letters are probably all so similar in their descriptions of the students that it is not even worth it to worry about them at all. It is just an added stress on top of all of my school work, essays, and sports activities. I know it is important to build good relationships with teachers, but it seems so easy to find a teacher that will write an excellent recommendation whether he/she actually knows the student well or not. Obviously, I'm not going to pick a teacher to write a recommendation letter that I do not get along with. Therefore, the college is not going to get an objective view of who I am as a student and as a person.
I feel a little like I'm being asked to suck up to a teacher for a couple of years to convince the teacher to write a good recommendation. Another problem with the recommendation process is that some teachers at my school have a limited number of recommendations they will write. So if I have spent 3 years building a relationship with a teacher, I am not even be guaranteed he/she will write my letter. I worry about ending up asking a teacher who barely knows who I am to write mine.
Most of my teachers have been working at my school for on average of 15 years or so. That means they have been writing college recommendations for probably around 14 of those years. It seems like once they have written 50 recommendation letters, all of them would start to blend in a little bit. Every once in a while they probably get a student who is extremely outstanding, but for the most part, I'd imagine that the recommendations look a lot alike. To make their lives a little easier, maybe the teachers will just form a rough outline for all of their recommendation letters and add a few adjectives here and there to describe each student. All I can hope for is that I get lucky and my favorite teacher will not have filled up her quota on the number of letters she will write.