January 28, 2005

The teen’s guide to college applications

By Stephanie Foo
Special to the Times

Forget the business world, the real world or actually attending college. Applying is where all the stress is.

I haven’t even set foot into an institution’s hallowed halls yet, and already I’m stressing so hard my head is about to spontaneously combust. By the time January rolls around, many high school seniors don’t even want to go to college anymore, they’re so exhausted.

Of course, their minds change when April comes and they’re actually rejected from all of them. Then they panic, and have a nervous breakdown. I’ve already scheduled mine for a convenient free afternoon.

But the good news is, since I had to go through the strenuous college application progress multiple times, I think now I’m an expert on it. I’ll share with you, the guide into getting accepted by a good college.

SATs
The first step to college applications is taking the SATs. Now, don’t be fooled when you see a question like:

This word means a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole.
- synecdoche
- whoopee cushion
- antidisestablishmentarianism
- cat

This is not an ordinary question. It isn’t as simple as using the process of elimination and picking the most logical answer. This is an SAT question. This means freaking out.

If you get this question wrong, your SAT score might go down to just below an acceptable margin. If that happens, then you might not get accepted into a good college. And then you won’t be able to become a doctor, or whatever it is you want to be.

Then, since you won’t be a doctor, you won’t save the people who would not have died if you had become a doctor and treated their melanoma or their foot cancer. Or spare someone from living a life of shame because you would have fixed his or her raging hernia.

And then since you won’t have a good job, you won’t make enough money to support yourself or to meet a nice professional man or to make babies. And if you don’t make babies, then you won’t make the kid who intercepts the call from the terrorists about blowing up the whole world with weapons of mass destruction and diffuses them and saves the earth. Then everything will blow up and the human race will cease to exist and it’s all because you didn’t know what synecdoche means!

Oh, crap, now my hair’s on fire.

By the time you finish worrying about that, the time’s almost up and you have to bubble in random bubbles. Hint, it’s often C.

Personal essays
The next step is to write your personal statement and essays for the college. The personal statement should be an important moment in your life or a great obstacle you’ve overcome. If you have any unique qualities, now is the time to emphasize them.

If you are a middle-class white average teenager, consider yourself in deep doo-doo.

If you are a toeless orphan, financially challenged Lithuanian aborigine, consider yourself accepted into Stanford, honey!

Colleges all want to be special by having cool kids no other colleges have. And how many toeless orphan financially challenged Lithuanian aborigines are there in the United States? Probably not a whole lot! So of course, everyone will want him!

They also love deeply troubled kids who were forced to swim through shark-infested waters or beaten by many evil massage chairs. If you are one, it means that you’ve prevailed over your troubles and used them to become the strong, confident person you now are! Just don’t mention that little habit of twitching and drowning whenever you get near the Sharper Image.

Application questions
Lastly comes filling in all the application questions. This is not as stressful for you as it is for your parents. It involves their cooperation as you barge into their room at 3 a.m. (at the last minute before the application is due…procrastination is a teen’s best friend) asking what their yearly income is along with your social security number, birth weight and number of hairs on your body.

Then you can freak out as your computer crashes (twice) when you try to send the application in and you didn’t write down all the information so you have to barge back in on your parents while they howl, “$60,000 A YEAR, 7 POUNDS 8 OUNCES AND YOU’RE GROUNDED!”

And after it’s all over, then comes the aforementioned five-month wait for the results. But don’t worry. No matter whether you get accepted or not, there’s always ways to be successful and happy in the real world.
Unless you let it get blown up! Jerk.