I Scrolled College Confidential at 2 a.m. and Realized We’re All Lying About This Stuff
I was digging through my old desk at my parents’ house last weekend, looking for a winter scarf I left behind after college, and I found my crumpled senior year notebook. The pages are covered in half-erased Common App prompts, tally marks of how many schools I’d submitted to, a sticky iced coffee stain that bleeds through three sheets, and a note I scrawled to myself in the margin at 1:47 a.m.: “If I don’t get into any school I’m gonna move to Canada and herd sheep.” That made me laugh, because I’d forgotten how deeply that panic lived in my bones for a whole year.
I remember one Tuesday night my friend Lila showed up at my window unannounced, red-eyed, because she’d just spent an hour on r/collegeapps looking at “chance me” threads. Some kid with a 1550 SAT and 15 APs was worried he wouldn’t get into Northwestern, and Lila counted her own APs: 11. She sat on my bed picking at a peeling Studio Ghibli sticker on my laptop and said she might as well not even bother applying, that she was already way behind everyone else. I counted mine, too: 10. We split a bag of stale cheddar Goldfish I’d had in my desk since August and both sat there panicking, like we’d already lost some unspoken race we didn’t even remember signing up for.
I bought into all of it, back then. I had this first draft of my Common App essay that I actually liked: it was about working at my grandma’s rose nursery every weekend in high school, how I learned to tell which bushes would bloom again after a bad frost, how I’d sit on a crate by the entrance and listen to regulars talk about their kids and their divorces and their first gardens when they were my age. It was boring, maybe, but it was mine. Then I read a thread on College Confidential that said admissions officers don’t care about “low-impact” extracurriculars, they want to see leadership and tangible change. So I scrapped the whole thing. I wrote a new essay about the food drive I helped my student council set up for two hours once. I talked about “building community” and “addressing food insecurity” and all these words I didn’t even really understand, because that’s what I thought they wanted. I got asked about it in my interview for my state school, and I stumbled so bad I had to pause and drink half a cup of water just to collect myself. It was humiliating.
I ended up getting in anyway, of course. I’m studying botany now, just like I wanted when I was writing that dumb nursery essay I threw away. When we all got our acceptances, our friend group got coffee at the sad Starbucks by the mall before graduation, and that’s when it hit me how much we’d all been lying. Jake, the kid who got into Yale, said he didn’t even want to go. He wanted to go to art school and illustrate children’s books, but his dad went to Yale, and he’d spent four years building his resume around international relations, and he couldn’t back out now. No one knew what to say. We all just stirred our lattes and nodded, because we all had something like that. I had my fake food drive essay. Lila had added three fake “leadership positions” to her activities list that she never actually held. We were all performing for these admissions officers we’d never meet, and we’d started performing for each other too.
Combatting that toxicity isn’t about some big protest or a viral TikTok thread about “self care” during app season, at least not for me. It’s just the small, stupid things I do now when people ask me for advice. Last month my 17-year-old cousin texted me, panicking because a TikTok she saw said if your essay doesn’t have a “hook” in the first sentence you’ll get rejected immediately. She told me she wanted to write her essay about making friendship bracelets for the kids at the local elementary after school, but she thought it was too boring, that it didn’t show enough “impact.” I almost opened my text box and typed the same garbage my college counselor told me: “Maybe add something about how you learned leadership from organizing the bracelet making nights?” Then I stopped. Because she doesn’t care about leadership there. She just likes doing it. I told her that instead. I told her if she writes what she actually cares about, even if it’s boring, it’ll be better than any fake essay about something she doesn’t give a shit about.
I’m not perfect at it, honestly. I still catch myself buying into the bullshit sometimes. Last month I was at a house party, and a new acquaintance asked me where I went to college. When I told him my state school, I immediately added “it’s actually really good for botany, it’s not just a safety school” like I had to defend it, like it’s worth less than an Ivy League degree. That’s the toxicity, right? It seeps into you even after you’re done with apps. It doesn’t just go away because you got accepted somewhere.
I ended up texting my cousin that photo of my old fake food drive essay yesterday. I didn’t send her a big inspirational speech about how your worth isn’t where you go to college, because that’s the kind of cheesy stuff that makes people roll their eyes when they’re panicking about apps. They already hear that from every adult who’s never sat through a 2 a.m. panic spiral about AP counts. I just wrote “I wrote this garbage and still got in. Wanna get boba after school this week? We can work on your bracelet essay if you want, no extra leadership stuff required.” She texted back a heart emoji and said yes. That’s enough, I think. We don’t have to fix the whole culture overnight. We just have to stop lying to each other, and stop lying to ourselves, one boba date at a time.
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