I turned eighteen on March 1, which for me marks another challenge I’m trying to face with as much courage as possible: a statement of intent. May 1 is the deadline for many high school seniors across the nation to send in an enrollment deposit to a college they will attend in the fall.
My birthday reminded me that all I have worked for, all my parents have worked to help me with, is turning a new page for me. After I submitted my last college application on the 15th of January, I wanted to crawl into my covers and forget that my applications were in the review process in admissions offices across the nation. I am done with the application process and I can no longer change anything I did or did not do in the course of my lifetime to try to better impress college admission officers. It is a difficult thing to accept. Ultimately though, I understand that it is impossible to try to change anything at this point.
Hearing Back From Colleges
I received my first college acceptance on Valentines Day. I cried when I opened up my first college acceptance letter. It did not matter to me that it was not necessarily my first choice. Honestly though, I feel like so many of my classmates have forgotten one important thing: it is a blessing to be high school seniors and still be considering where we want to spend what will lead us to the rest of our lives.
To have made it this far, is further than my parents know to guide me through. I am so very blessed in having made it this far. To know that a mere months from now I will graduating with honors from high school does not feel real. It is all still very intimidating. It is daunting to think of the estimates I have in my head about how much I will either have to take out in loans or find in scholarships. It is frustrating, amazing, and scary. I do not want to forget that I am so very blessed. Waiting to hear back from the rest of my schools can’t scare me because whether I accept it early on, somewhere in the middle, or at the last minute, things have always happened for a reason in the past and little has proved me otherwise.
One by One: Part II of Hearing Back From Schools
I received five rejections in one day. The hardest thing for me in all of this has been telling my teachers and counselors who wrote recommendation letters for me and stood by me throughout the whole process, that I didn’t make it. I just don’t know what to do. I feel like I’ve disappointed everyone who believed in me from the start. I could have accepted the fact that I had no more than three options for schools next year, if I didn’t have to speak about it to another soul ever again. But I had to tell my mom and counselor.
Telling my mom that I had been rejected to every single QuestBridge school I applied to, was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. All I had wanted from the start was to be able to tell her that I had the option to go to a school I both loved and could afford without loans. My mom had so much hope that I would be accepted to the prestigious universities I had applied to. The first thing she told me was that she was mad those schools didn’t know who they were missing. I doubted those schools felt anything when they rejected me but it made me laugh and smile the smallest bit. Everything aside, I knew I would receive some harsh rejections, but I did not expect to come out of the application process with only three of the seventeen schools I had applied to as options.
By Driving Into the Future…?