“what if I get rejected” by Aiden H. '28

I’ll cut to the chase: it’s November, which means that a lot of the people stumbling across the blogs are among the tens of thousands of anxious students and family members who are going through the college application season, and are either trying to vibe out whether they want to apply to MIT, or they already have and now must wait a grueling amount of time to figure out their admission status.

Essentially, nausea is in the crisp autumn air for a lot of you.

And, as an elder now,⁠01 It has literally only been 8 months since I had college apps I can tell you that I was nauseous once, too. But as a self-confirmed psychic, the tragic fate I had predicted for myself had unfortunately come true.

This is how I got rejected from my “dream school”, and how I got into this one.

***

Throughout middle school and high school, one of my best friends and I had a pact: go to Stanford. We famously donned matching Stanford hoodies together and became annoyingly giddy at the mention of anything Stanford related. I left it to her to decide why, exactly. My younger ears knew that it was a very prestigious school in sunny California, and I was sold. My “dream school” had been decided, an unknown blood oath I had taken to extort myself for the next five years towards an ambiguous goal of being a college student not just anywhere, but at a very specific college (if it sounds ridiculous written out bluntly, that’s because it is).

It’s not as if I didn’t want to go to Stanford initially, but the attachment solidified as years of romanticization played out over my Google tabs as I looked at classes I could take, majors I could choose, and dorms I could live in. Some people around me–my mom who went to her state school where she was guaranteed automatic admission, friends who were only applying to CSU a mile up the road–initially thought our commitment to Stanford was stupid. I find this sentiment troubling. To the extent that we want to inspire younger generations to always go after their dreams and simultaneously put so much pressure on higher education, it’s only natural that high schoolers begin to subscribe to the mentality that a college is one of the most important factors in their future. It’s not stupid to feel passionate about a process you but so much of yourself into. 

So when the summer before senior year hit, I was nothing more than a floating body trying to find the creative will to write application essays. The first thing I learned? I’m awful at lying. While I tried to turn every prompt into a story about self-growth and perseverance, everyone I had peer review the essays saw right through it. I’m naturally very pessimistic, so it was as if someone took a Disney Channel version of my real personality and plastered it across the page with words stolen from Thesaurus.com.

This was my worst nightmare. I had to be the ideal, happiest, most developed 17 year old that Stanford had ever seen, radiating nothing but joy and optimism and intelligence that I could uniquely bring to their campus. Except I have never in my life had enough self-confidence to be optimistic or believe that I truly had something to bring to the table. This was especially true when I forced myself into the rabbit hole of college-applications YouTube.⁠02 Please for the love of all things green and good get OFF of those videos. Getting into every ivy and your dream school and having already cured cancer is not something anyone is comparable to! Don't make yourself feel that pressure. My application to Stanford felt like the most unrealistic goal I had, but also the one I put the most pressure on.

College applications are hard because they are simultaneously the most intense and the most fabricated self-reflection you’ve probably done. It’s not every year that we are forced to reexamine ourselves to ask if we are good enough not just for a school or a job, but a lifestyle that is being sold to us.

I eventually submitted my application feeling less than okay about it, and then the gaslighting came. I understand that, yet again, this is the optimism I always fail to see, but the incessant reassurance from everyone I know “that you’re definitely getting in!” just increased the pressure. With how and where I grew up, I was never expected to necessarily “go far” by traditional measures of success. So when I decided I would try, it felt like I had something to prove. Now that everyone believed this mirage I had put up, it had to stay, when really nobody but me cared.

Next was the interview. As both a people pleaser and someone trying to be accommodating to the person who could decide the fate of my application, I skipped class to drive 20 minutes to a coffee shop on the CSU campus. We sat outside despite heavy winds, which I insisted were fine because the interviewer wanted to sit there.

It was awful.⁠03 The interviewer literally told me to go to CSU instead of Stanford and when I said The Great Gatsby was my favorite book he disagreed with my taste and told me I needed to be into 'more academic' books like the one he was currently reading on the history of Stanford University. There's <em>a lot</em> else but that's a rant for another day. I normally don’t have interview anxiety or difficulty talking to adults, but I sobbed in my car for an hour after and called my friend to tell her that there was no way we were both getting in anymore. It already felt like the life I had desired for the past 5 years was being stripped from me without my control.

At that point I thought my chances were pretty low. Still, for the week before decisions were released, my head was foggy and my anxiety was spiking. My friend and I were at a debate tournament in Cheyenne the day they came out, which both helped and hurt the process. They were released a 6:00 P.M., immediately before we had to go argue about federal student loans. I knew I would feel better if I could immediately be distracted after, so I opened it immediately. My friend knew for a fact that, despite how much it killed her putting it off longer, she had to wait until we were leaving the tournament so that she could find out alone.

Neither of us got in.

***

What people don’t really talk about past their disappointment of getting rejected is how much the pity stings. In an instant everyone around me switched their tune from “you’re destined for Stanford, the greatest school in the world” to “that stupid school doesn’t deserve you anyway”. Whether or whether not either is true, it still felt weird.

What else people don’t talk about is how lonely it feels, putting yourself out there to be judged by an anonymous panel only to be rejected. The process can echo a lot of insecurities we already hold for ourselves, forcing us to trace a mental list of every way we think we don’t compare, asking what reason it was we don’t deserve something we wanted. I am a deeply regretful and nostalgic person. To my core I feel the weight of every decision and life path constantly weighing on me, the heaviness of not getting what I want sits like an anvil on my chest.

But at some point, time has to move on.

One of my debate coaches used her phone to draw over the Dean of Admission’s face with crude images, and I guess that was the first step to moving on. Step two was repeating the process, another dozen times in the 30 days left I had left to submit applications. Because just like any dream, if you lose it you must find another. And I did that by applying to every other school I could in order to compensate for what I felt like I lost. When you plan everything out so intensely, every other path, even the better ones, seems like settling for the life you decided on. But as I eventually began researching other colleges, I noticed something: they’re all the same.

Okay, they’re not all the same, but in the aspects I thought mattered they are. Lot of studies show that it is not what school you go to that determines how successful or happy you are, but the general work ethic and accomplishments you have that make you “qualified” to attend prestigious schools. Anything hyper-specific about one school you can create for yourself at another. The only thing that does change are the location and the name–everything else is what you make it to be. I noticed everything I had admired at Stanford exists in some form at another school–schools like MIT (among others, of course).

Before I found out about Stanford, I hadn’t really thought about applying to MIT. The same friend was planning to apply, so I decided to make an application on the website and put it on the back end, only completing it if I had extra time. That “extra time” turned out to mean I didn’t open the application again until noon the day it was due. I didn’t have a lot of time to create entirely new essays, so I reworded some I had used for other schools and sent it in.

It was only after I applied that I truly started to discover what MIT had for me. I never thought I would get in, but I went down YouTube spirals watching cheesy “Day In My Life At MIT” vlogs⁠04 We've all binge-watched the Nina Wang content, right?? and read a backlog of blog content anyway. From January to March, MIT transformed from one of the schools I wasn’t going to apply into one of my top choices. Even then (though I swore I wouldn’t attach myself to one school), MIT wasn’t atop the mental ranking I had made of the rest of the schools I applied to.⁠05 I didn't get into Columbia either 🎉

It turns out I got into some I wanted. I also got rejected from 9 others. And while of course there was excitement, committing is still a tolling process, no matter where you go. It’s officially turning away from what feels like every other life you could’ve had. But what people forget is that you are smart enough and capable enough to be able to do well in more than one environment.

Right now, I am taking probably the same classes with the same demographics of people that I would at almost any other school. And while my life will differ because of the minute details, my “college lifestyle” per se is not something that was bequeathed to me during orientation week, something that only comes from the soil of Killian Court. If you are passionate enough to even apply for a place like MIT, you are 100% going to be fine, even if not at MIT.

I’m not going to tell you that it doesn’t hurt, but I will tell you that you’re strong enough to get over it, however long it takes. And I do still think about Stanford, but definitely less. Like all pain, it doesn’t go away, but instead escapes into the background for you to move on.

I know that if on the day I got rejected from Stanford a student wrote to me saying “You’re going to do great things! Just not here babe :( “, I would have immediately punched them in the throat as violently as possible without remorse. I also know that when I meet people now who have gone to Stanford, I just ask how they like it, have a mini-daydream about “what if I went there”, and then move on because I probably have a pset to do for the college I actually attend. I also know that there are people reading this who will get into Stanford and not MIT.

Some of you will get to live out my “dream”, I might be living out yours. But at some point when you look back on wherever you’ve been, your dream will be going back to what you had and not what you didn’t.

So just breathe, take a nap, eat a sandwich, and make a mood board or something until decisions are released.⁠06 No, they will not come out early :)