| Teen decides that people should not be labeled based on college (5/09) | | Print | |
| Written by Dylan McHugh | |
| Friday, 22 May 2009 | |
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I’m here to tell you that that’s a load of bull hockey. Alright, maybe not all of it. College is a Big Deal. It’s four years of your life. But where you go to college shouldn’t be a scale of how smart you are or how driven you are or… anything. College is just a new campus to slave away at with a tiny room to sleep in. Ever since freshman year, I’ve told my parents that I wanted to go to a college people have heard of. Heaven forbid I go to some “backwater” college where I’d have to explain why I went to such a podunk place. The consequences of going to such a slum of a school would follow me wherever I go: I imagine a dinner party 20 years in the future, where an impossibly thin Audrey Hepburn-type with a flute of champagne will ask me which college I went to in my younger days, and I’ll mutter out an answer that garbles “Harvard,” and hope for the best. Then I’ll run back to my beat-up, second-hand Saab, drive home and cry myself to sleep. So, when senior year finally arrived after the inhuman marathon known as “junior year,” I applied to 20 schools. “20?!” people would respond with terror, the color in their face draining away quicker than water down the sink, their hands searching for a banister or a rail or anything solid to grab onto. Yes, 20. Well, I was rejected from 15 of them. If I weren’t so crippled by waves of inadequacy and utter disappointment, it might’ve been a funny coincidence that, at around the same time the rejection letters started flowing through my mail slot like a never-ending torrent, I was performing in a play about a high school kid who gets rejected from his top choice colleges and goes berserk. I was shut out from all the UCs I applied to and banned from the theater departments of every school I auditioned for. Save for two — University of Evansville and Fordham — who put me on the waitlist and then sent me an official rejection letter a couple weeks afterward. I wasn’t particularly enthused about the schools I got into, a few CSUs and colleges in Oregon and New Jersey, because I was still judging them by my harsh, dinner-party standards. “Oh, you went there?” they’d say with concealed amusement. “That’s nice,” they’d say with commiseration, before sliding off to talk with the Yale grad. But when the smoke finally cleared and the news finally settled, I realized I got pretty lucky. A little while after I resigned myself going to one of my B list schools, I ended up getting into one of my top schools through the backdoor (not in the department I wanted, but that’s ok) and I’m even luckier that my family has the resources to pay for it. Am I still a bit bitter? Who wouldn’t be? But the experience taught me that college shouldn’t be a label that can be slapped onto someone by society’s all-too-vicious hand of judgment. Just because you go to a state school doesn’t mean you’re a blithering idiot, and just because you go to an Ivy League doesn’t mean you’re smart enough to double major in brain surgery and rocket science. Chances are, you know someone that got into a college you don’t think they’re qualified for (come on, be honest). Nevertheless, if I meet an Audrey Hepburn clone and notice that, no, she hasn't heard of my college, I’ll consider it her loss. The college you go to isn’t a label that’s tattooed on your forehead for the rest of your life — it’s a footnote. There is life after college. Share this article:           |
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to listen.
