Worrying About College

I t seems as though I talk about college (or college related topics like the SAT) quite a bit in this column. I’m not sure why. My lead theory is that I’m so preoccupied with getting all the right forms into all the right people on time, in order to apply for scholarships and sign up for tests, that it sort of tints my whole life with equal parts anticipation and anxiety.

I promise – and this is a pinkie promise – that I will abstain from all this throughout the entire month of May. If I win a scholarship, I will not so much as peep. When I take the SAT, I will keep all my gripes to myself. If a crimson-colored limousine pulls up to my door and the presidents of fifty colleges jump out and elbow and shove their way to the porch, vying to be the first one to offer me all my tuition, room, and board for four years, plus my own private jet, nobody will ever hear about it – except, perhaps, for the confused lawncare fellow attempting to discover how the trampled remains of our front yard met their grisly fate. However – and this is quite a big however – I will need to get all of that out of my system before May hits. So here are all the thoughts on college I plan to have for the next five weeks. Enjoy!

• The “love letters” have slowed to a comparative trickle, but I still get a college admissions glossie at least three times a week. I’ve started cutting squares out of them and making origami flowers. I’m not sure what I should do with them, but in the meantime they look much prettier lying around the house than “Case Western Reserve University: Your Perfect Match!!!”

• The SAT, by the time you get this, will be upon me in ten days. I’ve been cramming in vocabulary words and mathematical algorithms like crazy. This may or may not be responsible for my burgeoning quotient of erudicity, or the fact that I occasionally recite the first seventeen numerals of pi when Mom asks me how my day went.

• The Class of 2015 (my class) has picked out its caps, gowns, stoles, and invitations for graduation. The scariest part about this is that it doesn’t scare me.

• I got an invitation from an eminent university to attend a summer camp featuring lectures by “worldrenown scholars”. I’m not sure how the invitation ended up in my mailbox (after all, I’m not what you’d call eminent-university material), but the typo amused me so much that I stuck it in the back of my English binder as a reminder to proofread.

• My grandparents got a new puppy. (Okay, this has very little to do with college, but I want to get it out of my system now so I’m not tempted to write a whole column about her housetraining misadventures.)

• My cousin’s friend Leslie stopped by for a chat after she and her parents had finished visiting Whitman.

We talked for a while about the Whitman campus, the SAT, and the sky-high cost of out-of-state tuition.

And although the two of us live just about the two most different lives you can imagine, we were able to chat on perfectly level common ground about the exciting, terrifying, headscratching experience that is the search for higher education.