College: The Transition To Adulthood

Over the past few decades, college has been elevated to a status that has never been seen before. In modern American culture, it’s viewed as a stepping stone to adulthood, a major milestone in one’s education, and practically a requirement for any decently paying white collar job. While this perception is slowly being eroded now by the new focus on side hustles and get rich quick schemes (looking at you, Medium) as well as vocational and service based jobs, the fact still remains that, each year, millions of students around the world agonize about their grades, what colleges they’re applying to, where they’re going to go, and how it’ll impact their future career goals.

In my case, it was no different. Having grown up in an Asian household, I had been expected to outperform and excel in my studies from a young age. While my older sister and younger brother have far and away met that expectation, I personally never applied myself or studied hard enough to truly impress. While those around me ran away with 4.6 GPAs and academic accomplishments, I was stuck with my As and Bs and nothing outstanding to my name. I was the quintessential average student, and to be honest, I somewhat preferred it that way.

When it came time for college applications, though, I faced a major dilemma: I was expected by everyone to get into and attend a top school in my field, allowing me to network and rub shoulders with the best and brightest and climb the ladder to greatness. However, with my grades, I was looking at higher tier state schools or mid-tier private schools at best. Nevertheless, I hedged my bets and decided it was worth a shot.

I began my college canvassing in earnest in my senior year, closely studying lists of top-ranked engineering and computer science schools and researching all the benefits and drawbacks of each one in detail. Having ruled out my chances of ever getting into a school like MIT or Harvard, I focused on the big guy in town: Carnegie Mellon University. While I had approximately the same chance of getting into their Computer Science program as my dad does of becoming the president, their Information Systems program stood out to me as one worth checking out. Intrigued by the possibility of wearing tartan and painting fences at midnight for the next four years, it found its way onto my college list as my top choice.

The rest of my list fell into place quickly: UIUC, Michigan, Rice, UT Austin, UNC Chapel Hill, Purdue, and my safeties, RPI and Penn State. A vaguely strange assortment of schools that shared one thing: a decent computer science program and not being too rigorous. They all offered fairly decent curriculum that wasn’t too demanding, good student life, and interesting extracurriculars; I wasn’t that picky except for the “not dying of studying too much” part. I was happy, but knew that the chances would end up being slim.

Tossing my applications in with schools I was nowhere near qualified for was, in hindsight, probably one of the biggest wastes of money and effort in my life. I either should have studied harder or aimed lower, and since aiming lower wasn’t an option to my parents, my studies ended up being the issue. Despite a stellar 1570 SAT score, my effort in my classes showed: even the classes I excelled in were ones I’d consistently pull A- and B+ in, and I even got a C+ in a class through a combination of stupidity and unluckiness.

My essays weren’t stellar either; despite my delusions of being great at writing and that my topics were “unique” and “memorable”, my essays about overcoming perceived difficulties in my robotics club fell flat… and hard. Then again, as someone who hadn’t really been exposed to the wider world yet, I justifiably didn’t have a meaningful struggle or success story to tell that would pull at the heartstrings of the poor college admissions counselors forced to read my application.

Decisions began flowing in a few months later, and it began quite successfully: I got thick packets in the mail from Penn State and RPI congratulating me on my admittance into their venerated institutions. Unfortunately, RPI seems to be under the impression that you’re willing to fork over $250,000 for a piece of paper, so despite it’s fairly impressive rankings in multiple of my interest areas, I was never able to seriously consider it as an option. With regards to Penn State, I had picked it because, well, it was everyone’s safety school, and had a pretty good reputation in Pennsylvania as a good all-around school.

After my first two acceptances, however, things began going downhill: deferral from UT Austin, rejection from Purdue, deferral from Michigan, the list went on. I wasn’t optimistic about my chances at getting out of deferral purgatory, though, and wrote those off as lost causes. I was wondering where things had gone wrong: surely, out of all the universities I’d applied to, I should get into at least one of them?

Oh, how I wish I could go back in time and slap naïve 18 year old me.

A record number of applications to top universities, combined with my subpar statistics compared to others in my demographic, meant that my chances were lower than most; debate over affirmative action notwithstanding, among Asian males, I was bottom of the roost and that was what ended up being my downfall. If I was an ardent believer in affirmative action, I might say here that I didn’t quite make the cutoff for Asian males that was artificially higher than other demographics, and while that is, to some extent, true, one cannot blame statistics for their own personal failures, but merely, use them as a stepping stone for one’s own advantage.

My naïveté had convinced me that, despite my low grades, my SAT and essays would carry me through; that I deserved to apply to these T50 schools and would excel once I was a proud student of one of these esteemed institutions. Unfortunately for me, colleges don’t subscribe to the same philosophy, and tend to prefer people with already-existing achievements and track records, instead of those who have faith in their own improvement.

Anyways, looking back on the process, there’s a couple things I wish I had done differently overall:

1. More meaningful involvement in robotics. I mean, come on, my imposter-syndrome robotics experience hardly amounted to anything, and half the time I spent on the team was useless teenage politicking over useless positions anyways. My achievements on the team consisted of a poor attempt to better organize the team and successfully pissing off a large amount of the people I was supposed to work with regularly. Even today, the sum of what I’ve gotten out of it consists of a much improved outlook on leadership and project management and an unhealthy obsession with pieces of fabric.
2. Diversifying my boundaries earlier. I only really began expanding my boundaries after high school, diving into social good, nonprofits, hackathons, and such, and even now, I feel limited in my existing bounds. If I’d taken steps to diversify and expand my boundaries earlier, I might’ve had enough experience to draw from to make up for my abysmal grades, and been able to have wider boundaries even today.
3. Studying harder. Seems obvious but if I’d even put a marginally larger effort into my studies, I might’ve been able to push myself over the cutoff needed to get into some of these schools. I basically cruised through high school without a care in the world and without ever feeling the need to study, despite my natural retention and learning only being able to take me so far. This bit me in the ass in college, because I had no study habits to speak of, and might have kept a lot from happening if I’d just done slightly better holding myself accountable to my academics.

If I’d just taken the time to change these couple of things instead of spending hours online talking to weird robotics nerds from across the country, I might have been able to scrape acceptance at some of these good universities that I had my eyes set on. Alas, that was not the case, and I set out from high school with an enrollment in Penn State’s computer science program and a determination to do better. But even that would not last…

Part 2 Coming Soon

Day 6/30