By
Justin Snider
, Amherst College
Go East, Young Man
Like most overachieving high school students in California, I entered senior
year with thoughts of Stanford and the Ivies dancing in my head. “Anything but
the UC system,” I told myself, oblivious to my own pretension and the fine
public education I would be passing up. During my junior year I had done the
obligatory whirlwind tour of the East Coast - nine schools in three days! - a
trip many overly ambitious California high school students take when the sun
finally loses its allure. I desperately wanted to go east. The further away the
better. My logic was quite simple: my parents had moved from Michigan to
California in the mid-1970s to escape the harsh winters, so I - bored with only
experiencing one season for eighteen straight years - would return to the cold
climate. Oh, what wouldn’t I give to see the leaves change colors! And the
East Coast seemed so much trendier than Michigan, though I pacified my parents
by applying to the University of Michigan. When I later dared to call it my one
“safety” school, they were aghast at my snobbery. To this day I think they
secretly hoped I would be rejected everywhere else, to establish once and for
all I wasn’t too good for their alma mater.
No such luck. They would have to wait until round two - graduate school - for
their revenge, when the University of Michigan shrugged an indifferent shoulder
at my application for their Ph.D. program in English literature. Now I was the
one suffering shock, especially since I was accepted (with funding!) by the
University of Chicago, a substantially superior program for English. This just
goes to prove the one and only rule in admissions decisions valid at both the
undergraduate and graduate level: everything is entirely random. Anyone who
tells you otherwise is either a liar or uninformed, not to be trusted. If death
and taxes are the only certainties in the game of life, arbitrariness and
disappointment alone are guaranteed in the admissions process. I have only one
friend who has never been rejected - neither by undergraduate institutions nor
medical schools. But he’s palpably different. A Marshal Scholar, he’s now
spending two years on our government’s money studying at Oxford. For the vast
majority of us, we must learn to accept the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune (to borrow from Hamlet), and that means learning to welcome - embrace,
even - the sickeningly slim envelopes. In my two rounds of applications, I like
to think I’ve seen more than my fair share of them: ten rejections, five
acceptances and three wait-lists.
