Here at Fieldston, failure is a bit of an anomaly. We are offered infinite opportunities for retakes, for extra credit, for extra help–everybody around us is counting on our success. We think ourselves entitled to all the opportunities the world has to offer, loath as we may be to admit it. The world is our oyster, and not even a pandemic should get in our way.
The college admissions process throws a bit of a wrench in this starry-eyed disposition. Rejection is a very legitimate possibility for Fieldston’s seniors–often for the very first time in our short, cushy lives. We are violently reminded that not everybody will love us.
It’s a genuinely jarring shock to the system. “When you’re rejected,” said a senior who chose to remain anonymous, “it really hurts because you picked that school and started to envision your life there, and when you get rejected that means the college didn’t agree. Obviously.”
After anywhere from four to 14 years of being told that we should trust ourselves, that if we follow our own hearts nobody can rightfully tell us no, it hurts a great deal to be apparently told that we aren’t enough. All at once, as almost-adults, we must face how cripplingly fragile our self-esteem may actually be. “Yeah, I know that I shouldn’t take it personally,” said another anonymous senior, “but it’s really hard not to. It feels like I’m not good enough.”
College, especially, exists as a total status symbol within the mostly-liberal, mostly-bourgeois mostly-intellectual world of New York’s independent schools. In the same way that, years ago, it was assumed without question that our mothers would marry and start families, that our grandfathers would serve in the army and their wives would cook and clean for them, it is assumed that we, the most educated and aware generation America’s seen, will attend the country’s finest universities once we graduate highschool.
It feels like a betrayal to our generation and our privilege to fall short of any institution’s standards–those of us without acceptance letters this December in the wake of Early-Decision are left asking whether we’ve wasted all the resources we’ve been offered by our education and our money. Are we any more than what we’ve been given?
Only time will tell.
