To all tryhards who have the ears to listen,

   Please at least know this —live your life. The world isn’t just composed of grades and colleges and careers—physics and chem and calc do not define what it means to “live life”. STUDYING IS NOT CONSIDERED A HOBBY, SO STOP SAYING THAT IT IS. Start learning how to play basketball; learn how to cook with some friends of yours; go out to Wawa at 2 AM with friends to get a F’Real milkshake (don’t drink too many of those, you’re gonna die of heart failure much earlier in life than you should). But please, it helps to have a life. One of the most memorable apps I completed this fall was for MIT, and the first prompt that they ask you is “what do you do for fun.” And it’s gonna be SO obvious if you’re just faking it. Nobody “starts a nonprofit and likes to feed malnourished children in third-world countries” as a “fun activity”. In fact, later in the app they ask you what you did this past summer, and for the love of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, DO NOT PUT DOWN Y2 OR C2 AS A SUMMER ACTIVITY. MIT even encourages you to put down trivial things, like biking with friends, watching TV. Don’t try and put down the “perfect summer activity” that will wow admissions officers—that’ll just show how fake and shallow you are in the end. The admissions process should simply be an extension of your genuine self—writing these essays shouldn’t be a concerted effort to make yourself a perfect applicant, but rather a byproduct of the passions and experiences you already have. You shouldn’t force yourself to say anything in college essays—it should come naturally as you write it.

  Now, I get it—you might think that these points are moot and meant to represent an idealistic world that bears no fruit by the end of it—you feel as if all your hard work has “gone down the drain.” Yet, consider this; if all you’ve done up to this point is something you’ve genuinely enjoyed doing and haven’t been doing just for the sake of looking smart or wanting to be a “perfect applicant,” then you shouldn’t even be feeling this sense of regret. It should’ve been a joy to do all that work regardless of what a college thinks about it when they send you back a decision. None of it “goes down the drain” if it truly was something you enjoyed doing in the first place. So try to make sure you don’t “regret” anything by senior year—make sure that you do things because you enjoy them, not because you want to get into Penn and then get all these compliments from teachers and others to try and feel a sense of validation and shallow self-worth for all you’ve strived for these past four years. Oh, also, please don’t “lock” yourself into a college-life will move on even if you don’t get into your “dream school.” Yeah, Penn might be a “perfect fit” according to you and so on and so forth, but listen— life moves on. Regardless of whether you like it or not, you have to make the most out of what you have, and that’s life too—you’re not going to get everything you desire and set your mind to on a silver platter meant to please. Sometime you’ll have the worst things in life thrown in your face and you’ll have to deal with what you have, whether you like it or not. So start now and try not to get into that sort of unhealthy mentality—it’ll serve you better in the long run.

   So listen—to all who will eventually have to write a ledger of their life, and make an account all that they have ever accomplished and been proud of; their sorrows and joys; their triumphs and travails; don’t hesitate to think deeper. Please please. I promise you’ll be the better for it.