Ivy League Prospects
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009Senior year in high school and Gary is the middle of the pack. He has average grades and gets an average score on his SAT test. He wants to go to an average school and is just getting started in the college admissions process. The problem is he is not quite sure what he wants to do with his average life and therefore which college would suit him best. He starts out online.
After some thinking on what kind of career he wants to pursue, he decides that he will just worry about getting his associates degree and then decide on a career. He looks at a lot of towns across the country and happily realizes that there are colleges in each of them. He proceeds to go to each of the website’s college admissions pages and prints off application after application. He has thirteen colleges just to be safe, since he is after all, just average. He fills one out. After about an hour of tedious work, he finally finishes filling just one out and puts it in an envelope, ready to be sent.
He proceeds to the next one. The information is very similar to the last application, but he presses on. The next application is almost a carbon copy of the previous one. This experience is similar to getting bounced around to different doctors and having to fill out your history of long medical problems over and over and over again. This is not what Gary wants to do.
He thinks to himself that there has got to be a better way to do this. He goes back to searching on the net.
He returns to the college application sites and realizes that he can just type in all of his personal info right on the site. This way isn’t much easier for him. His tabbing skills are not all they are cracked up to be. He envisions a website where he can put in all the information college admission’s officers need one time and send that information to all the colleges he wants.
He decides to do a search on Google. He puts in apply for college online and some other phrases. He looks through some of the sites, but nothing is to his liking. He decides to be more specific and types in Dartmouth College Admissions and Yale Admissions because both of his smart buddies applied and got accepted there. He thinks maybe they knew something that he didn’t. (Besides being more intellectual than him). He wants something more. He wonders why he can’t find some kind of tool or something that will allow him to apply to any college he wants with a few clicks of the mouse.
“Where could I do that?” he thinks. “What would I have to type in to get search results that show me how to apply to more than just one school?”
He is about to surrender to the whole painstaking process. While he knows just what he needs, finding it has become tedious. Usually Gary never spends this much time on any problem he has. He has been spending many hours trying to find any information and is completely discouraged and distraught. Because of the whole ordeal. He just decides this is just not worth the hassle and only sends in the two applications he filled out by hand earlier. He crosses his fingers and sends them in.
Two weeks go by and he has not heard from either college. A month. Two months. He is graduating tomorrow and that day gets the letters he has been waiting for. He can not wait to find out which one he got into. He opens the letter from a state university first and reads that they regret to inform him that with his information, he has not been accepted. He shrugs it off and opens the one from his 1st choice in colleges. He is shocked to read that he has not been accepted to this one either.
His mom had told him earlier that if he didn’t get accepted into college before the night of his graduation, then she would kick him out of the house. As Gary walks down the isle for his graduation he looks at his mom with a heartbreaking look on his face. She already knew what he was going to tell her. Sure enough, Gary gets kicked out and sent on his merry way. He is forced to get a job at McDrivein’s, where he spends the next ten years. If only he could have found something that would have gotten his name out to more colleges so he could have gotten an education.
By: Mindy Lindquist