EMMA PHILBROOK: STUDENT LIFE

People ask me all the time if I'm looking at any colleges in particular. My stock answer is "No, but a bunch of them seem to be looking at me."

It's the eternal curse of anyone who's taken a standardized test and checked the little "Yes" box for "Give my address to colleges which I might be interested in". You get deluged with e-mail, snail mail, and even small packages. It's all glossy and neatly formatted, and after about three days, it all starts to sound the same. And it doesn't matter how well you perform on the test, either - that only changes the name on the brochures, not their massive quantity.

I have a table that's simply covered in college admissions mail. Letters, postcards, posters, booklets, even a stack of slotted cards that can be used to build 3-D structures. It seems like I have about half a tree there, so I feel a little guilty about throwing it all out. But it's not exactly worth keeping for posterity, either.

The solution? Use it as crafting material! - Those big glossy postcards make great origami flowers. Just trim them into two squares each and get folding. - Letters are excellent fodder for papier mache. Their nice heavy weight also makes for a deadly-accurate paper airplane. - Brochures and the thinnest booklets are nice collage fodder. Use an especially stiff postcard as the 'canvas' and cover with pictures, words, and maybe a small origami flower or two. Bonus points: Give your collage gravitas with a theme such as "Statues of Founders Surrounded by Question Marks and Disembodied

Faculty Heads." - You could try saving everything up and making some huge modern-art sculpture that subtly makes a point about the immense amount of academic pressure on modern-day students and the loss of innocence inherent in this. Suggested sculpture forms include blobs, globs, and piles, all of which are easily made by tossing your stash with a cup of white glue. If you're an overachiever and want your sculpture to actually reflect some artistic ability on your part, add a dash of glitter along with the glue. - Big booklets are nice for making such things as secret boxes (glue all the pages together and then hollow out the inside), large-scale modular origami (remove binding, tape all pages together in a square, make enormous crane that will probably end up coming to life and eating the rest of your mail), and blunt instruments (saturate with stiff glue, roll into tube, and pummel thy foes). - If you're desperate, try reducing your whole stash to pulp and making homemade paper. You'll have exactly the same amount of useless dead trees you did at the start, but now it'll all be a funky gray color. - If all else fails, you could just leave it in an imposing stack to show off your testing prowess and academic desirability to the world. However, said imposing stack is heavily prone to toppling onto innocent bystanders, so you may want to consider just making several thousand origami flowers instead.