Reconnecting with my peers from high school through the internet has been a very sobering experience. I am decidedly in a more favorable bracket of career success compared to my peers than I was in high school. I realized, slowly, that all that really set me apart was an incredible string of good luck which has miraculously lasted about six years.
They tell me I must have had talent in me all along, and a few even claim to be able to have seen it in me when I was young, but they are wrong. I am not a genius.
People write to me from this blog, and tell me I must be the luckiest person in the world to have had all this happen to me in such a short time, but I do not believe in six-year lucky streaks.
I do believe in statistics.
***
Father Jerry wasn't the greatest college guidance counselor, but he did excel in looking pretty annoyed. "You can't apply to this many universities. It is a waste of your time. You should figure out what you want and apply to a more targeted selection of schools. You realize most students here apply to four schools at maximum."
"I'm paying the application fees all out of pocket."
"Do you realize how many recommendations you are asking your teachers to write?"
I rearranged the files in my hands, "Here, if I cut these, I can do all of them on the common app except for these three. That's the same amount of work for you as four, isn't it?"
He glared.
"I'll bring you stamped and addressed envelopes and everything."
Applying to 11 schools turned be a lot of work for me with all the supplemental essay questions to the common app. Nobody wanted to proofread that many essays, and I had trouble making enough time to finish them all. I spent over 700 dollars on application fees alone, money that comes slowly for a babysitting high-schooler.
That money remains the single greatest financial investment I have ever made in my life. College application systems are too complicated for somebody like me to really predict, especially at 18. I got accepted to what I thought were stretch schools with full rides and rejected from safety schools. I held acceptance letters in front of schools I could not afford, to try to get them to increase their financial aid offers. This safety kept me cool under pressure, even when a scholarship interviewer pulled out my university application and pointed out I had written "National Merit Commended Schollar" under the awards category.
PS: Hell yeah I won that scholarship anyway.
***
I'm curled up with a laptop on the floor, which must have not been mine because I couldn't afford one at the time. Batman is flipped upside down on the couch with his legs swinging against the back, his face just off the floor near Jace's.
"Ugh, I am tired of writing essays for the Feds."
"How many?"
"37"
"WHAT?"
"I'm applying for 14 internships at this center"
Jace gives me a look which expresses how little pity he has for somebody who set themselves up for this.
"What's this one on?" Batman asked.
"Why... why I want this internship opportunity..."
"Oh," Batman said, "Well... you want the opportunity to fucking learn shit, and what's more important, to learn how to learn some shit, which is a skill you'll need all your life..."
"You're brilliant."
"Nah, I'm drunk"
I removed all the expletives, cleaned up the grammar, and submitted his rant as an essay anyway.
And that was how I came to work for the feds.
***
My senior year of college I had an interview almost every Friday from January to March. Teachers thought I was just making it up to cut classes. When the school hosted a career fair I would take the afternoon off to walk up and down every single aisle and talk to every interested company, to see if I would be happy there, and to see if they would hire me.
The long and the short of it is that I am not more clever than anybody else: hell, most people can probably put together a better essay than a drunken friend's rant, or at least can spell the name of awards they win. I don't even think I'm luckier than anybody else.
My point is that I play absurd odds, but that I win because I play a lot of times. I was denied from 12 of the 14 internships from that program alone. Most of my peers did not even apply for 12 internships in total, let alone at one center. I was denied from more colleges than most of my high school classmates applied to.
Some people get an idea fixed in their heads, and they keep trying until they succeed. Kudos if it works for them, but I am never sure enough of anything to do it. I just reach out to every good opportunity I see, and see which ones respond back.
Some people keep a bizarre tally of wins and losses. I don't understand this. In five years nobody cares how many colleges you were denied from: they care which one you attended. Your resume doesn't include the jobs you never got, your transcript doesn't include the independent study proposals that got shot down, your checkbook doesn't reflect the scholarships you didn't win, and your boyfriend doesn't care how many boys turned you down for coffee before you met him.
The only person, in the vast majority of cases, who will ever know about your rejections is you. Your story will only be written of the opportunities you won, and what you did with them.
My senior year of college I had an interview almost every Friday from January to March. Teachers thought I was just making it up to cut classes. When the school hosted a career fair I would take the afternoon off to walk up and down every single aisle and talk to every interested company, to see if I would be happy there, and to see if they would hire me.
The long and the short of it is that I am not more clever than anybody else: hell, most people can probably put together a better essay than a drunken friend's rant, or at least can spell the name of awards they win. I don't even think I'm luckier than anybody else.
My point is that I play absurd odds, but that I win because I play a lot of times. I was denied from 12 of the 14 internships from that program alone. Most of my peers did not even apply for 12 internships in total, let alone at one center. I was denied from more colleges than most of my high school classmates applied to.
Some people get an idea fixed in their heads, and they keep trying until they succeed. Kudos if it works for them, but I am never sure enough of anything to do it. I just reach out to every good opportunity I see, and see which ones respond back.
Some people keep a bizarre tally of wins and losses. I don't understand this. In five years nobody cares how many colleges you were denied from: they care which one you attended. Your resume doesn't include the jobs you never got, your transcript doesn't include the independent study proposals that got shot down, your checkbook doesn't reflect the scholarships you didn't win, and your boyfriend doesn't care how many boys turned you down for coffee before you met him.
The only person, in the vast majority of cases, who will ever know about your rejections is you. Your story will only be written of the opportunities you won, and what you did with them.
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