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College Success
(Admitted to Washington University) |
"After using EssayEdge for both my freshmen college process and also now to help my transfer application, I cannot recommend any other essay service that is better. I was admitted to one of my top choices, Washington University in St. Louis. When I met the admissions officer after my acceptance, he clearly remembered details that I had written in my essay in our conversation! Thank you!"
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Harvard Drunkenness
By Rachana Shah , Harvard University
Content Provided by our
Friends at CampusNut.com. Visit
CampusNut
My whole life, I had always wanted to go to Harvard. My parents never really pushed me in that direction, in fact, they were pretty oblivious to my whole college search, only hoping that I went somewhere that would impress their social circle.
So when junior year rolled around, and everyone was frantically searching for schools, I only feigned interest. I knew where I wanted to go, and I didn’t care if they offered my major or if it wasn’t in the area I wanted to live. Harvard could have been located at the base of an active volcano and I would still want to go there.
My application process reflected this. My college advisor had given me this wonderful program called “Apply!” which was a godsend to the upwardly mobile yet idle high school student that I was. You simply typed all your information into one database, and the program stuck it on the hundreds of applications it had stored on it.
So of course, I did my application for Harvard and sent it in. I applied to University of Michigan, my brother’s alma mater, just in case. And then I applied to a hodge podge of other good schools in what we called at my high school, “an ivy sweep” because I suppose that was the sensible thing to do.
I didn’t apply to all the good schools though. I basically applied to the schools that were to be found on my Apply! Software. For a while, I contemplated Princeton and Stanford, but Princeton had WAY too many essays (I had been repackaging the same one for all my applications), and Stanford was not on the Apply! database. I cringed at the thought of actually having to fill it all out on a typewriter, and thought the better of it.
When the interview rolled around, I have to admit, I was incredibly nervous. True, I had never set eyes on Harvard, and knew next to nothing about it, but I was pretty certain that I wanted to go there and I was terrified my half-baked dream would get crushed. For the past few days, I had been imagining possible questions and how I would respond to them.
However, my interviewer never did ask a single question. We started chatting about this and that, and just when I expected her to say, “ok, now for the interview. With what three people, dead or alive, would you want to eat dinner?” she told me it was over. A bit surprised, I headed home, wondering what would come of it.
So a day before letters were due back, I was cruising through my neighborhood on my way home from school. I parked in my driveway and went to fetch the mail when I saw it. The letter, sitting there, beckoning me. I wasted no time and tore it open. I only had to read the first sentence. In a state of utter delirium, I started running down the street to my best friend’s house to tell her the news, dropping half of the mail on the way.
When she saw me, breathing hard and gleefully relating the news, she looked a bit concerned, asked if I was feeling ok, and said that it might do me good to have a glass of water and sit still for awhile.
All the years of hard work I had put in were soon forgotten. At that point I felt like the luckiest girl alive, a girl who had won the university jackpot.
Part Two
I went to visit Harvard after already committing to attend for the pre-frosh weekend they hosted in the spring. I was staying with a girl who picked me up completely hung over. I fared better than her other pre-frosh who she was too hung over to pick up earlier. This poor pre-frosh was left standing in from of the John Harvard waiting for her until out of sympathy my host’s roommate fetched her.
Now, I expected drinking, but this girl brewed beer in her closet!! She had her own setup right there that she proudly showed off. The cops had busted her room the night before, so all her bottles were shove hastily in the closet with her brewing apparatus.
She wanted to take me to lunch in the dining hall, but recalling that she had lost both her own and her best friends ID, she realized this was an impossibility. But refusing to make a pre-frosh pay for her first meal at Harvard, she asked to see my schedule of events (which she subsequently forbid me to use for the rest of the weekend). She studied it for awhile, and then told me to follow her.
So we showed up at the Taiwanese Society meeting. Neither she, nor I, are even remotely
Tawainese, but she marched up confidently, professed that she was very interested in Taiwanese culture, and chatted comfortably with the members and she deftly collected food. We made a quick exit, and went from club meeting to club meeting. We capped off our afternoon by ending up at the Black Student Association barbeque, she, still mingling naturally, not feeling the bit out of place as she helped herself to fried chicken and watermelon slices.
That night, I met up with some other pre frosh, and so did not go out with her. However, at about 3 in the morning, she bursts into the room, a few pre-frosh in tow, who then proceeded to throw up everywhere. Needless to say I had a few qualms about the place I had signed away four years of my life to.
So here I am, at Harvard. Though my time here has been nothing like my pre-frosh experience, I sometimes still wonder. Was it the right choice? Was it right to commit to a school that I had never visited, and not excruciatingly search? I really can’t tell you. But what I do know is that no matter what the food in the dining hall is like, what course they offer, what professor they have, whether you go on their tour 10 times, you will never know whether the school is right for you or not.
Happiness at a school is determined by so many things that the applications process cannot quantify. To be concise, there is no way to know whether you will like a school or not until you go there. That sounds kind of bleak, that college is just a crapshoot, and you get lucky and have a good time there or not. But I think that it is promising. It means that you are not dependent on circumstance, but that you can create your happiness anywhere you go. I thought when I got into Harvard that my happiness was set. However I learned that I have to make the most out of where I am, whether Harvard or anywhere else.
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