Assignment 4: Emma Lauritzen- Seize the day, not the application process

When I was about to start high school my older brother, who was about to be a senior, helped me compile a list of every club and team I was going to join. I grew up watching movies where the main character was the president of every club, varsity in two sports, and happy as can be. Therefore I assumed that to be wanted by any college I had to do this too. Bad idea. It was great at first because I made a lot of friends and I felt accomplished, I thought that any college would be impressed by my resume. However, life kicked in and I began to be overbooked, tired, and generally unhappy. I began to dive into my questioning of the college admission systems. How was I supposed to do all of this and still get good grades? My family had been encouraging me my whole life to be successful and my brother helped to warp the definition of success to being the perfect college applicant. I was angry at the idea of having to be perfect to get into college but I furious watching people in my schools doing clubs and sports they hated only to get into a good school. This is when I began to challenge the idea of being the perfect applicant and resent the entire college system. For months I researched and fell into a hole trying to figure out why I had to fit that movie cookie cutter. So, I did my AP seminar project on it. Slowly I began to realize that this belief that you have to break your back trying to get things to put on your college resume, is a terrible one. During sophomore year I changed, and I no longer wanted to do clubs for the application, but because I like them.
I am now in clubs I like. I think I got tired of watching people who were falling apart on the inside trying to manage their high school life. I watched my brother do the same as me in college. I went from having the same beliefs about success as the boys in the beginning of the dead poets society, to the boys at the end (not like Neil though, like the end when they figure out that life has more purpose than school). So, to the college admissions system I say: you suck.