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The official student news site of Coppell High School

Coppell Student Media

The official student news site of Coppell High School

Coppell Student Media

The official student news site of Coppell High School

Coppell Student Media

Business Spectacle: Lilys Hair Studio (video)
Business Spectacle: Lily's Hair Studio (video)
October 26, 2023

College isn’t as ‘cutesy’ as they say

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By Shruthika Pochampally
Staff Writer
@shruthreddy

What people never tell you is that getting into college is not the hardest thing you’ll have to do.

The first three years of high school are spent working towards higher numbers – higher grade point averages and higher standardized test scores, but the last year is an experience in and of itself, one that most students don’t realize takes the hardest toll on you.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget my first semester of senior year, where I not only took the ACT for the last time (with a lot of pressure to perform) but also applied to what seemed like a hundred colleges. When you have an idea for your future and so does everyone else, you realize that it’s hard to narrow down to just a few colleges, especially if you’re as indecisive and diffident as I am.

Trying to maintain my GPA while going through the extensive and cumbersome experience of college applications, was a lot harder than freshman, sophomore and junior years combined.

Everyone you know will tell you that senior year is the easiest by far, that your teachers don’t give you much work, that senioritis is a real thing that will help you coast through the last few months of high school. I, however, found myself in a blizzard of deadlines, commitments and life-altering decisions. I was faced with a trident-shaped fork in my road – I had three colleges that had just as many pros as cons as the other two and could not decide on one for long without changing my mind.

People will romanticize the concept of getting into and committing to a college. They will tell you that you should have a good idea where you want to go, that you should know your top choice going into the process, that the minute you step foot onto a college campus, you will know if it’s for you or not.

I can attest that the campus I fell in love with at first sight was not the campus for me: Oxford College at Emory University, with luscious greenery and beautiful, otherworldly architecture was a hidden gem, but it was evident that it was nonetheless not the campus for me – 30 student lectures and a tiny campus was not my idea of an ideal college experience, and the financial burden was too large to disregard.

Moreover, the college I wanted to go to in November is not the college I’d want to go to now, and nothing that I thought was true about the college admission process is actually true: several months ago, the University of Texas at Austin was the only school on my mind. Now though, it terrifies me that I almost committed to that school. While I love Austin and UT is an exemplary school, I don’t think that going there would have given me the kind of undergraduate experience I need to get into medical school.

I realize now that it’s better to take on some things as they come, rather than plan far in advance for them. The best example of this would be the college essays I wrote in the first week of September that were trashed by October and replaced with improved, more intellectual versions of themselves. In just two months I found myself a drastically different person.

Though deciding to go to an extensive, cutthroat eight year medical program at St. Louis University is one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made, I can tell you that after making that decision, the toil and hardships of the past four years of high school have amounted to close to nothing. The numbers have accumulated to nearly nothing – scores and averages and ranks come together to form one giant mass of numerals that can now be discarded from my mind without guilt – the same numbers that once haunted me and took control of my mind.

All I know now is that I have a clean slate and eight years of medicine ahead of me. I see a romanticized horizon of endless opportunities and countless revelations. And yet, I know better than to romanticize the future. High school has, if anything, taught me one thing, and that is that very little matters other than the present milliseconds in which we all coexist as one, very little is worth of romanticizing at all.

Now, once my deposit, contract and housing application are sent in and my biggest worries are “should I have popsicles at my grad party?” and “should I rush in a sorority next year?”, I can say that deciding a college wasn’t as nearly as massive and all-encompassing as I had thought it was.

So what I recommend to incoming juniors and seniors is – stop thinking about where you want to go to college, and start thinking about what it is you really want to do in life. When the time comes, assess your competence, and decide what tier of colleges would be best for you.

Realize that prestige may not be the most important factor. Realize that money is often a hindrance, but that is okay, because your undergrad isn’t the most important four years of your life. Realize that the college is what you make of it, but at the same time, it will be one of the most important decisions of your life.

Talk to current college students, trust in your parents elderly wisdom, think wisely, but most importantly, be open and ready for every idea you have about college and your future to be heavily altered in the months leading up to commitment day, and be welcome to this change of heart, because it will only open better doors for your future.

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