the college landscape is COOKED

throwaway for privacy reasons background - low income aapi at a low income bay area school - sports recruit - 4+ gpa/1400+ sat

i spent most of my life trying to live up to the kids i saw in newspapers, books, magazines, etc. i wanted to be the top of my class, the genius, the harvard admit. but it nearly took away everything that actually mattered to me.

i was lucky enough to discover my sport at a young age and be good enough to be able to be recruited to a t20 school even though my family was severely struggling at my many points to pay for my sport. but even through it all, i kept comparing myself to the elite community i found myself stuck in.

it often felt like i was leading two lives. i was next to the children of CEOs and found myself constantly comparing every aspect of my life to theirs. however, i was also watching my parents struggle to pay the bills, and my public school could barely afford computers.

my mental health struggles really caught up to me my freshman year, and my athletic performance suffered tremendously because of it. and that leads me to what i really want to talk about today: the current college admissions experience connects to the age old but ever more prevalent question of “will i ever be good enough?”

news flash, you won’t. you will never be as good as the stanford grad who started their own multimillion dollar company at 12 and that’s OKAY (if you are and you're reading this more power to you). we are so caught up in building prodigies younger and younger that we are neglecting developing ourselves, our minds, our psyches, as self-confident individuals. so many young people today feel that they need to get into an ivy league or they’re worthless because they have tied their value to getting into a certain school.

when we tie our self worth to external factors, we allow the risk of if we fail at that factor, our self perception is also impacted. suddenly sucking at my sport when i was a prodigy killed me because i attached who i was to what i did, and when we institutionally condition teenagers to tie their worth to what they can accomplish through 3.5 years in high school to get into another school, we sacrifice their sanity for…what exactly?

we inflate the value of these so called elite institions when these institutions gain their value from the PEOPLE they possess. the people and who they are is what really matters. so what i’m trying to say to the people in the subreddit is that YOU MATTER. you have to believe that you will be fine whether or not princeton accepts you. you don’t NEED them as long as you know your value and trust that the reason why you will be successful is because of who you are.

going back to my athletic career, i still haven’t gone back to my peak. i have a very small time period to catch opportunity of being recruited to the “school of my dreams.” but i gained so much introspection because i was forced to discover myself apart from what i was good at and what i could contribute. i found out what i like and my limits, and although my other ec's are just average, i am proud of what i have done because i cared about them.

you might be thinking, “she’s a recruit idk why she’s stressed out.” it’s because the current college environment makes us think that EVERYTHING we do should be curated towards college admissions and getting into one specific school is worth throwing away all other schools we could go to. i still feel very insecure about my chances bc we have made an environment that is designed to make CHILDREN think that we will never be good enough no matter what we do.

the way elite colleges make themselves elite is by alienating children from being children and instead molding them into something we’re oftentimes not. the difference between elite and your local colleges is simply just class. being average is perfectly fine, and i hate that in the hyper competitive bay area community i stem from, we have inadvertently normalized being anything but that.

i am a very ambitious person by heart but the dark side of ambition is that my value was usually tied to who i could become rather than who i already was. to anyone currently in the admissions cycle, i want you to know that you are valuable, worthy, and have something to show the world just as you are at this moment. i know you want to be the best possible version of yourself and you think that xyz school will help you achieve that, but please just keep in mind that it is YOU that will be the reason why you make it.