• All
• Police and Fire
• Business
• Education
• Obituaries
• Opinions
• Lifestyle
• Calendar

Back on the topic of all things college-y, regular admission decisions are starting to roll out of admissions offices all over the country. Reflecting on my first two decision letters, I had a few puzzling questions.

What strikes me the most about this strange season is not, as I expected, the tension and pressure and general feelings of queasiness, but the bizarre lack of heightened emotions. So far, I've gotten back one oh-so-sweet acceptance letter and one bitterly electronic rejection notice.
Both were from schools I was seriously interested in, too. I wanted to be elated when I got that first big packet, but, oddly, I wasn't. It was more a sigh of relief and the sensation that I had "lucked out." What should have been an awesome occasion was reduced to a blip on the radar of daily activities. What happened to the glory and fanfare and victory march?

Similarly, when I read that supposedly-terrifying, dream-breaking rejection
letter, I wanted to wallow in self-pity, devastated and depleted, but I couldn't muster the surprise. More than anything, I felt like the letter had absolutely no connection to my intellectual abilities or scholastic
attainments. Actually, I felt like it had no connection to me at all.
Granted, I was sad, but sad in a weak, sappy, unenthusiastic way-the way I was sad when David Hernandez was voted off of American Idol. Well, a little sadder than that, but the idea was the same: a missed opportunity that you weren't that invested in anyway. But why would that be?

Is it because I applied to so many schools that one or two doesn't seem like a very big deal? Did I dilute my interest in any given school every time I clicked "send" for the next set of tests scores for the next set of applications for the next set of schools?

Post-application submission spree, I'm reevaluating the wisdom of applying to a lot of schools I know little-to-nothing about. On one hand, I have no idea what I want and can't even get properly excited or depressed about the acceptances and rejections respectively. On the other hand, I've gotten into 50 percent of the schools I've heard back from, which, statistically speaking, doesn't sound so hot. In that case, maybe applying to more schools is better because it increases my odds of getting into college at all? Maybe it's still too early to call and I should stop acting like an over-enthusiastic junior political analyst who calls winners for presidential primaries with only 2 percent of districts reporting?

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who feels this way-as if the whole college admission game is a crapshoot. Last summer, before I started my applications, I was talking to a young woman who works at Dana Farber.
She was about 25, a recent Boston College graduate. She was from Louisiana and she applied to about 15 schools. She knew nothing and she picked BC because of the football team. She applied to so many schools because, she said, you never really know what's going to happen. The whole thing is up in the air. In her case, she found a perfect fit, loved the school, still loves the school, and now works full-time in Boston.

Awesome.

But doesn't it seem like the randomness of this whole affair undermines the whole modern education system, which supposedly rewards dedicated students with greater opportunities for advancement? Or is the system inherently self-correcting? If you get rejected from one school while your buddy is accepted, does that increase your likelihood of getting accepted to another school from the same tier and increase the likelihood of your friend getting rejected? How do you calculate the odds? (If I had calculated the odds and presented the results as part of my application, would that have been sufficiently interesting to get me into my favorite schools?) Is that what college counselors are for-answering questions that probably have no answer and trying to make you feel better about yourself? Is there any point to asking these questions, knowing that the answers are beyond my reach and the admissions decisions beyond my power to change?

I guess I'll just have to wait and see.