You Are Not Special by David McCullough Jr

Author:David McCullough, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

RIGHT NOW, THOUGH, you just want to get in.

Everybody wants you to get in . . . everybody except, probably, or so goes the fear, the admissions people. They sit somewhere, possibly robed, certainly pale, spider-veined and grouchy, waiting to get their bony fingers on your woeful little application. For sixteen unimpressed seconds they’ll scan it through their horn-rims, failing to suppress dismissive snickers. These are the gatekeepers not just to college but to the rest of your life. To success. Fulfillment. Happiness. An attractive spouse. Three adorable clear-eyed children. A fine house in a fine town. The sleek import in the driveway. The trips to Alta. The shingled cottage in Chatham with pink tea roses along the picket fence. Their judgment, further, yea or nay, is a referendum not just on your academic record and the sundry extracurricular backflips you’ve been turning for Lord knows how long, but on your very quality as a human being. Your justification for taking up space on the planet. Theirs is a judgment, too, on how and by whom and for what you’ve been raised. And your teachers. Your high school. Your community. Every aspect of your nurturing, back all the way to conception, has been arranged, orchestrated and packaged for this moment. Now there you stand before them, laid bare, awaiting judgment. At least that’s sure how it feels.

And you don’t know what they want.

You can’t know. Because, quite reasonably, their every standard is fluid. Because every qualification of every applicant matters only in relation to the qualifications of all the other applicants in this year’s pool, subject to the wishes of an administration seeking a certain kind of inbound class. It all rests on how your particular combination of qualities and achievements compares with everyone else’s—which for many has the unfortunate but predictable consequence of making preparation really just jockeying for position. And gearing up a flat-out arms race. A war of attrition. I’ll see your 2170 and 3.8 and raise it . . . 2230, 3.9, three 5s on AP exams, Spanish Club, Relay for Life, second team all-conference. Fine; 2280, 3.95, three 5s, Pres SC, R for L, National Merit semifinalist, concert viola, Habitat for Humanity, ulcerative colitis research internship, specimen collecting in the Galápagos, and a partridge in a pear tree. It’s a mad dash to stick as many feathers in the kid’s cap as it’ll hold—without giving away that’s what you’re up to. No, the kid needs to feather up as fast as he can, certainly faster than the other hell-bent cap-featherers in the vicinity, while appearing to do it purely for love of learning and God and country and serving his fellow man and woman and the transgendered and endangered species everywhere. Up with the morning sun with a song in the heart and all the extra-credit problems done, too, and some brisk calisthenics and a Pindaric ode and a little light Gordimer washed down with kiwi-strawberry Vitaminwater, and, while we’re at it, a $25 Starbucks gift card for the teacher, who works so hard .

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